I love the Dido Twite books, but perhaps do not recommend them if you're looking for just 1 book, as they are best appreciated as accumulatively surreal.
The first book of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is fairly complete in itself, and I feel all children should be issued copies of the series before their morals have quite closed up, like fontanelles.
My favorite mystery ever (which I reread so many times in fifth grade that I can recite stray sentences) is Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game. It does not have super-serious spy action, but there is an immense amount of sneaking around and also several times things blow up.
(Gosh, what is going well in Sue and Maud's relationship that they'd like to see more of? As much as I love Fingersmith, I have never been able to believe in the ending.)
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Date: 2012-02-23 01:55 am (UTC)I love the Dido Twite books, but perhaps do not recommend them if you're looking for just 1 book, as they are best appreciated as accumulatively surreal.
The first book of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is fairly complete in itself, and I feel all children should be issued copies of the series before their morals have quite closed up, like fontanelles.
My favorite mystery ever (which I reread so many times in fifth grade that I can recite stray sentences) is Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game. It does not have super-serious spy action, but there is an immense amount of sneaking around and also several times things blow up.
(Gosh, what is going well in Sue and Maud's relationship that they'd like to see more of? As much as I love Fingersmith, I have never been able to believe in the ending.)