Review Detail

Once again, the animals take center stage, and the mystery is not about what happens to them, but about what they DO. This sense of agency is especially fun when the creature from the past who is causing most of the problems is discussed. Since this is a mystery, I don't want to spoil the surprise, but it was interesting to see the animals having to contend more with each other than the humans. The humans are panicking and are affected by the ghost hoax, but the underlying cause is created and solved by the animals. I would have liked to see more of Madison, however, since she was an interesting foil to the animal protagonists.

The adults are a bit clueless, and don't seem to know half of what goes on in the apartment right under their noses. To be fair, there is a lot going on. The pets were a bit hard to keep straight at first, since it's been a while since I read the first book, but it's easy to catch up. The delightful illustrations by David Mottram help to clarify these characters.

None of the apartment buildings I've lived in were hotbeds of mystery and intrigue, but I lived in them when I was an adult. For children, there is a lot of scope for the imagination and a lot of people with whom to easily interact. This would explain why books such as Marks's A Soft Place to Land, White's Nightbooks, Papademetriou's Apartment 1986, Ford's The Mysterious Messenger, Markell's The Ghost in Apartment 2R, Markell's Click Here to Start and Stead's classic Liar and Spy have so much mystery. The addition of animals makes this great for younger readers who like to think about pets having rich intellectual lives.