The Boy Vanishes: The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd
The London Eye Mystery
By Siobhan Dowd
How does someone vanish into thin air? Magicians make beautiful women disappear. Harry Houdini made an elephant disappear. David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. All tricks. All illusions. But what about when your cousin disappears? Almost from before your very eyes. And he doesn’t reappear?
Ted and Kat, his older sister, wait on the ground while their cousin Salim rides the great London Eye, an enormous Ferris Wheel
like ride that towers over everything nearby. Salim never appears. He’s vanished. A mysterious man had given his ticket to Salim. Then, Salim had jumped to the head of the long, snaking line waiting to board the London Eye. Ted and Kat saw him enter the car. No one saw him again.
Together, Ted and Kat work to solve the mystery of their vanished cousin. The twist is that Ted has Asperger’s Syndrome, sometimes referred to as high functioning Autism. Ted doesn’t think in the same process as his sister, or the police. Obsessed with weather and shipping news, Ted mines the the things he knows and understands to make sense of what has happened. As a result, he forms a different picture of events and he dissects them in a unique way, testing ideas and perspectives and perceptions unlike anyone else looking for Salim.
Dowd’s writing is excellent. Clear, uncluttered and expressive. She carefully crafts her story, letting us into Ted’s thought process and giving us glimpse into the difficulties he experiences as a result of Asperger’s Syndrome. Once you read The London Eye Mystery you’ll understand why this excellent book won the 2008 Cybil’s award for best middle grade fiction.
Very sadly, we’ll not have any more books from Dowd, other than the four now published. As I was looking for a bit of information about her I found that she died in 2007 of cancer, the same year The London Eye Mystery was published. Before her death she established a trust fund to provide books for disadvantaged youth before she died. This information is available at the Siobhan Dowd Trust website.
Here are the other three books she has written:
A Swift Pure Cry (2007)
Bog Child (2008)
Solace of the Road (forthcoming in October 2009)
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