THE TREASURE TROOP

An 8-year-old’s summer gets puzzling when she’s named in her neighbor’s will.

Marly, whose best friend recently moved out of town, didn’t even know nice Mr. Summerling had even died, and she certainly doesn’t expect to be called for the reading of his will. She had liked the old man, who wandered around town with a metal detector collecting junk, but “he was next-door-neighbor nice, not give-you-something-when-I-die nice.” At the will reading, Marly meets her classmates Isla and Sai—and the three of them receive the strangest bequest. Mr. Summerling has left the three of them a treasure, which they can have if they solve a series of puzzles. The three kids barely know one another, but they gamely work together on the clues, each of which is depicted as if a facsimile in Budgen’s illustrations. (Each has one component a reader might be able to solve and another only the characters can decipher.) The trio’s friendship builds slowly, but they solve well together, and they’re friendly kids. Marly, who wears an eye patch for her amblyopia, is startled to learn that Isla wore one herself when she was younger. Both girls are White; Sai is of Indian descent. Both a fun, readable introduction to the process of cracking anagrams and pigpen ciphers and a friendship-oriented chapter book.

Maybe the real treasure is the friends they make along the way.