this lively, fun detective story was fun to read, but I could not stop being annoyed by the stretching of historical characters. ( )

This is a cute middle-grade mystery imagining the mischief Ada Byron Lovelace and Mary Godwin Shelley could have gotten into had they been contemporaries. With a supporting cast that includes Charles Dickens and Percy Shelley, this novel is an homage of sorts to the greatest creative minds of 19th-century England. A little silly and a little too modern in thinking for the time period, this is still a fun intro to the genre for young readers. ( )

-alternative what if historical fiction in which historical figures Ada Byron and Mary Shelley are you girls who become friends and start a detective agency to catch "clever" criminals who evade capture by the police.
-both characters have differences from each other which makes for interesting exchanges and conversations
-Mary's acceptence of Ada despite Ada's anti social behaviour makes her character a good roll model for young readers.
-book about friendship.
-no violence or fowl language to speak of. ( )

Fun romp with a reimagined childhood for an excellent cast of Romantic era authors and thinkers -- while it's not a complex read, I'm glad to have soemthing to recommend for fans of Enola Holmes. Between this and Sherlock, Lupin and Me, I'm glad to see a new crop of interesting kid detectives. ( )

This book is one of the most fun depictions of a genius kid (Ada Byron, aka Ada Lovelace). She's quite a character--completely clueless about social interaction, and yet ten steps ahead of everybody else. This author has a gift for writing hilarious banter and situations.

It's an interesting plus that these characters are at least vaguely historical (the back of the book has a fascinating section explaining where the idea of Percy, Mary, Ada, Charles, etc. come from). They weren't all together historically like this, but the fact that they were real people and many of them did at least have some real connection to each other added a bit to the charm of the story.

But despite its historical semi-plausibility, Ada is an over-the-top character who is impossible to take seriously, so the book puts itself firmly in the tongue-in-cheek story genre. Given that, I'm not sure why I was so bothered by the conclusion where something very unlikely happens with Ada's balloon. (That shouldn't be a spoiler; you knew when the story opened with a big balloon that something had to happen to it, and you probably also looked at the picture on the cover.)

As a detective story, it's not very sophisticated. I'm pretty sure if you know what "mesmerism" is you'd figure who did it and how long before Ada did. (Also, how does a pendant "have the property of mesmerism"? This is clearly not a hard-nosed detective story.) But I didn't enjoy this because it was a detective story; I enjoyed it because of Ada (and to a lesser extent the other characters).

I first picked up this book because our girls (10 and 7) have grown fascinated by detective stories, and they loved it. Maybe they liked it better because they didn't know what "mesmerism" was going into the story, but honestly, it was a lot of fun for me and them. ( )