By Marjorie Weinman Sharmat
A small boy detective who loves pancakes takes on his neighborhood's little mysteries, one missing thing at a time.
Nate is a detective, and he wants you to know it. He wears a slouchy coat, talks like a hard-boiled gumshoe half his size, and stops between clues for a stack of pancakes. When his friend Annie loses a picture she painted, Nate takes the case: he asks his questions, follows his leads, and cracks it with a satisfying little click of logic that a young child can actually follow along with. The stakes are tiny on purpose, a lost drawing, a missing pet, and that's exactly what makes it work for a brand-new reader, because it's a real mystery scaled all the way down to their size.
This is the mystery starter kit. The vocabulary is controlled and the sentences are short, so a child just off picture books can read a whole 'chapter book' in one sitting and feel enormous about it. Marc Simont's drawings sit on nearly every page to hold the meaning up. And because the case is solvable, a child gets to be the detective too, which is a fantastic reason to keep turning pages over the summer. There's a long line of these, each the same reliable, low-pressure shape, so a child who takes to Nate never runs out.