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The London Eye mystery
2008
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When Salim doesn't come back from his ride on the London Eye, his cousins Ted and Kat turn to the authorities for help, but when they offer no viable suggestions, the two use their sleuthing skills to figure out what actually happened. - (Baker & Taylor)

When Ted and Kat's cousin Salim disappears from the London Eye ferris wheel, the two siblings must work together--Ted with his brain that is "wired differently" and impatient Kat--to try to discover what happened to Salim. - (Baker & Taylor)

Ted and Kat watched their cousin Salim board the London Eye. But after half an hour it landed and everyone trooped off–except Salim. Where could he have gone? How on earth could he have disappeared into thin air? Ted and his older sister, Kat, become sleuthing partners, since the police are having no luck. Despite their prickly relationship, they overcome their differences to follow a trail of clues across London in a desperate bid to find their cousin. And ultimately it comes down to Ted, whose brain works in its own very unique way, to find the key to the mystery. This is an unput-downable spine-tingling thriller–a race against time. - (Random House, Inc.)

Author Biography

Siobhan Dowd was named one of the “top 100 Irish-Americans” for her global anti-censorship work with the writers’s organization PEN America. Her first book for young readers, A Swift Pure Cry, has been shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and the BookTrust Teenage Prize. - (Random House, Inc.)

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Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* The facts seem simple enough. While their mothers have coffee, Ted and his older sister, Kat, and their cousin, Salim, wait in a queue to ride the London Eye, an observation wheel that allows those locked in the glass-and-steel capsules to see 25 miles in every direction. A stranger from the front of the line offers one free ticket, and since Salim is the visitor, stopping in London before moving with his mum to New York, he takes it. Ted and Kat see him enter the capsule and follow his ride, but to their shock, he doesn't exit with his fellow riders. This book, very different from Dowd's searing A Swift Pure Cry (2007), is much more than a taut mystery. In Ted, Dowd offers a complex young hero, whose "funny brain . . . runs on a different operating system" (seemingly Asperger's Syndrome) and who is obsessed with shipping forecasts and with his inability to connect well with others. After several long days have passed with no sign of Salim, Ted must use the skills he has and overcome some of his personal challenges to find his cousin. Everything rings true here, the family relationships, the quirky connections of Ted's mental circuitry, and, perhaps most surprisingly, the mystery. So often the mechanics of mystery don't bear close scrutiny, but that's not so here. A page turner with heft. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.

Horn Book Guide Reviews

The best mysteries have at their centers gifted but very human sleuths -- their abilities balanced by equally significant flaws or idiosyncrasies. This one is no exception. Twelve-year-old Ted, who has Asperger's syndrome, is obsessed with weather patterns, the number of Shreddies in his cereal bowl, and the puzzle that is other people's emotions and actions. When his visiting cousin Salim disappears, seemingly into thin air -- Salim goes up inside a sealed capsule of the London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel-like ride, and doesn't come down -- Ted and his older sister (and nemesis) Kat join forces to solve the conundrum. Ted's uniqueness serves multiple purposes. As a detective, his literal, logical brain lets him step back from the fraught situation to see the solution. As a narrator, his need to observe people closely at all times lets us get to know the characters, especially Ted's family, unusually intimately. Not to mention himself: his hard-wired honesty, his never-ending struggle to make sense of the world around him, and his occasional unknowing naivetŽ (as when he lays awake thinking about "convection currents, isobars and isotherms [and] imagining the shipping forecast" and speculates, "Perhaps Salim had been doing the same") make him an especially sympathetic character. And the mystery itself? Worthy of its protagonist, with well-embedded clues and signposts young readers can easily follow -- at least in hindsight. Copyright 2008 Horn Book Magazine Reviews.

Horn Book Magazine Reviews

The best mysteries have at their centers gifted but very human sleuths -- their abilities balanced by equally significant flaws or idiosyncrasies. This one is no exception. Twelve-year-old Ted, who has Asperger's syndrome, is obsessed with weather patterns, the number of Shreddies in his cereal bowl, and the puzzle that is other people's emotions and actions. When his visiting cousin Salim disappears, seemingly into thin air -- Salim goes up inside a sealed capsule of the London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel-like ride, and doesn't come down -- Ted and his older sister (and nemesis) Kat join forces to solve the conundrum. Ted's uniqueness serves multiple purposes. As a detective, his literal, logical brain lets him step back from the fraught situation to see the solution. As a narrator, his need to observe people closely at all times lets us get to know the characters, especially Ted's family, unusually intimately. Not to mention himself: his hard-wired honesty, his never-ending struggle to make sense of the world around him, and his occasional unknowing naivetŽ (as when he lays awake thinking about "convection currents, isobars and isotherms [and] imagining the shipping forecast" and speculates, "Perhaps Salim had been doing the same") make him an especially sympathetic character. And the mystery itself? Worthy of its protagonist, with well-embedded clues and signposts young readers can easily follow -- at least in hindsight. Copyright 2008 Horn Book Magazine Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

When Ted's cousin Salim visits London, he insists on riding "The London Eye," an immense observation wheel. A stranger gives Salim a free ticket; Salim enters a passenger capsule; 30 minutes later, when the capsule returns from its rotation, Salim has vanished. What follows is an intricate mystery, related from the unique point of view of 12-year-old Ted, who has Asperger's Syndrome. Ted is a brilliant but literal thinker who sees things in things in terms of mathematical probabilities. His brain, though differently wired, is as efficient as a computer. It is precisely the logical mind needed to solve the mystery, and it saves Salim's life. This is a well-constructed puzzle, and mystery lovers will delight in connecting the clues, but what makes this a riveting read is Ted's voice. He is bright, honest, brave and very funny about his "syndrome" (his teacher has given him a cartoon code for recognizing the five basic emotions). The message, grippingly delivered, is that kids, even differently abled ones, are worth paying attention to. (Fiction. 9-14) Copyright Kirkus 2007 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

A 12-year-old Londoner with something like Asperger's syndrome narrates this page-turner, which grabs readers from the beginning and doesn't let go. As Ted and his older sister Katrina watch, their visiting cousin Salim boards a "pod" for a ride on the London Eye, a towering tourist attraction with a 360-degree view of the city—but unlike his fellow passengers, Salim never comes down. He has vanished. At the outset Ted explains that he has cracked the case: "Having a funny brain that runs on a different operating system from other people's helped me to figure out what happened." The tension lies in the implicit challenge to solve the mystery ahead of Ted, who turns his intense observational powers on the known facts, transforming his unnamed disability into an investigative tool while the adults' emotions engulf them. Dowd ratchets up the stakes repeatedly: is a boy in the morgue Salim? Has he drowned? Been kidnapped? Katrina and Ted work together to solve the puzzle, developing new respect for each other. The author wryly locates the humor as Ted wrangles with his symptoms (learning to lie represents progress) but also allows Ted an ample measure of grace. Comparisons to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time are inevitable—this release was delayed when Mark Haddon's book (from the same publisher) became a bestseller—but Dowd makes clearer overtures to younger readers. Just as impressive as Dowd's recent debut, A Swift Pure Cry , and fresh cause to mourn her premature death this year. Ages 8-12. (Feb.)

[Page 70]. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal Reviews

Gr 5–8— Ted and Kat lose their cousin Salim at the London Eye sightseeing attraction, "the largest observation wheel ever built." Given a free ticket by a stranger, Salim enters the ride, but he never emerges. Guilty about their part in the bungled outing, the siblings trace scraps of information that illuminate the boy's disappearance. Ted, who is something of an enigma himself, narrates the story. He has a neurological cross wiring that results in an encyclopedic brain and a literal view of the world. He finds it hard to read motivations and emotions, but excels at clue tracing and deduction. Kat, his older sister, deplores his odd behaviors but relies on his analytic brain while she does the legwork. The result is a dense mystery tied together with fully fleshed out characters and a unique narrator. Good mysteries for kids are rare, and this offering does the genre proud. London Eye is the best sort, throwing out scads of clues for discerning readers to solve the mystery themselves. Add to that Ted's literal translation of our world, his distanced view of an alien landscape of human interactions, and the ways he gains a better understanding of that world through the course of the novel, and the story is even more noteworthy. Suggest this as a read-alike to fans of Blue Balliett's Chasing Vermeer (Scholastic, 2004) or Lauren Tarshis's Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree (Dial, 2007).—Caitlin Augusta, The Darien Library, CT

[Page 113]. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

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