The Crown Affair, by Jeanie Franz Ransom

The day we borrowed ‘The Crown Affair’  from the library, for some reason, I had to have a lie down at lunch time – maybe it was morning sickness. So my lovely husband did the lunch-time reading while the kids ate. From the bedroom I could hear the story and I noticed that it sounded nothing like any other kid’s book we had ever read, it sounded very mature so I wondered if the kids were actually listening. Later when I had a chance to read it to them I realised that they were totally engaged in the story, and over the next few weeks as we read it multiple times, I began to see why and I really started to like it myself.

‘The Crown Affair’ is told from the point of view of Joe Dumpty, a private investigator, and as such it has the feel of and old-time detective/mystery novel. This gives the book a completely different tone than your average children’s book. However the other characters are very familiar to children and this helps children relate to the story.

Joe is on the case of a missing crown and follows a number of leads with the help of Spider. They investigate several leads before confronting their prime suspect. My kids love this kind of thing. They like to think they can work out the puzzle or crack the code, so solving a case is right up their alley.  The little look in their eye when they think they know what is about to happen, and then it does work out, just as they predicted, is a really cute moment.

So while this book is a picture book, it is not really suited to very young children. To get the most out of this book a child does really need to be able to follow a story line, so perhaps 4-5 yrs.

If you really like this book as much as we did there is great news, it is actually a sequel to ‘What Really Happened to Humpty’.

Even better there is an awesome learning resources PDF for ‘What Really Happened to Humpty’.