Welcome to Litsy!

Shenanigan Swift has always been known for mischief. A family reunion turns into a murder mystery and Shenanigan is ready to solve the case. With the help of her sisters, Shenanigan looks for suspects and finds out about hidden family treasure along the way. I was expecting a great mystery with some laugh out loud moments. I felt it was quite slow and lacked excitement and pace which was disappointing for a middle grade book.

It was a bright, well dressed morning in early May, and the Swifts were in the middle of a funeral.
#firstlinefriday

Starting this today. Just picked it up from the library.

The cover caught my attention and then I read the blurb about how each family member is given a name from the Family Dictionary. I knew I had to read this book

All the Swifts are meeting up at the Family House for the big Reunion which is a pretense to look for the hidden treasure. Then the Matriarch is pushed down some stairs and things escalate from there. Our heroine Shenanigan and her sisters have more than enough to figure out

Kids mystery about a family full of quirky characters, a reunion, a treasure, and some murders.

It‘s a murder mystery, a treasure hunt, a vocab builder and has an important message about identity and self-definition. Shenanigan Swift wants to find the Swift family treasure but so do all the other Swifts in for the reunion. Will they all live up or down to their names? https://cannonballread.com/2023/08/the-swifts-a-dictionary-of-scoundrels-elcicco...

I think we should bring this word back!

📸 Mental Floss IG

Authors first book. The Swift family gets their names from randomly choosing a page in the dictionary and pointing to a word. Their character then takes on the words meanings. Fun story, a family reunion leads to a mystery in finding the lost family treasure. A wordy book! Would be great to have a class look up their Swift names in the class dictionary. Have you seen a student use a dictionary lately?😂

Beth Lincoln‘s crime novel for readers aged 9+ (the 1st in a series) is a glorious, quirky affair filled with murder, mayhem and nominative determinism and illustrated by Claire Powell with spiky vim. It has a vibe of The Addams Family re-imagined by Wes Anderson with Lincoln injecting humour and heart into the plot as well as villainy and deception. It‘s one of the best children‘s debuts I‘ve read and I will definitely check out the next book.