The Friendship Feature: A Boxcar Children Book (The Jessie Files #1)

by Stacia Deutsch, Gertrude Chandler Warner (Contribution by)

Overview

Mysteries seem to follow Jessie wherever she goes.

Jessie Alden thinks her days of solving mysteries are over. With her new role at the student newspaper, as well as classes, friends, and boys, there's a lot to keep up with. And Jessie always likes to be prepared. But when a new boy at school comes to her with information about strange things taking place at his parent’s business, and she also finds out the club she’s writing her first feature on seems to know something about it, Jessie realizes her story is much bigger than she thought—and she can’t help but get to the bottom of it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807537862
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Series:	Jessie Files , #1
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	1,087,010
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	680L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Stacia Deutsch is a New York Times bestselling author who has written more than 300 children’s books, including Nancy Drew and Boxcar Children mysteries, as well as TV and movie tie-in novels, such as Girls Who Code: The Friendship Code and Hotel Transylvania. She lives in Temecula, California.

Gertrude Chandler Warner grew up in Putnam, Connecticut. She wrote The Boxcar Children because she had always dreamed about what it would be like to live in a caboose or a freight car—just as the Aldens do. When readers asked for more adventures, Warner wrote more books—a total of nineteen in all. After her death, other authors have continued to write stories about Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny Alden, and today The Boxcar Children® series has more than one hundred books.

Editorial Reviews

2022-03-02
In the wake of a freak storm, something is rotten in the town of Greenfield.

Jessie Alden is eager to dive into the new school year: new classes, new friends, new clubs, and, most importantly, new Jessie. That means leaving behind the old Jessie, who “hung out in a boxcar and solved mysteries” with her siblings. But when a new boy at school approaches her with a tale of a bizarre transaction at his parents’ art store and strange occurrences in her neighborhood pile up without adding up, Jessie just might have to don her investigator’s hat once again, this time with her friends by her side. Deutsch has given the Boxcar Children franchise a modern twist but retains salient features of Gertrude Chandler Warner's original series in creating her version of Greenfield. In doing away with the original family investigative team, this opener heralds a series that feels closer to the A-to-Z Mysteries by Ron Roy and John Steven Gurney, similarly suffused with red herrings, small-town sensibility, and unexpected antagonists, with the added overarching theme of the power of friendship. Characters are distinct and likable, if somewhat shallowly developed, and the surprisingly mature plot clips along at a spritely pace. Jessie and her family are presumed White; supporting characters are children of color.

A case worth cracking. (Fiction. 9-12)

Kirkus Reviews

"Deutsch has given the Boxcar Children franchise a modern twist but retains salient features of Gertrude Chandler Warner's original series."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher