The Five Lost Aunts of Harriet Bean - Hardcover

McCall Smith, Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0676977766 ISBN 13: 9780676977769

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2006

Synopsis

From the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series!

Knopf Canada is very proud to announce the first-ever Canadian publication of bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith’s books for young readers, featuring the extraordinary Harriet Bean.

In the first book, The Lost Five Aunts of Harriet Bean, Alexander McCall Smith takes readers into the world of 9-year-old Harriet, who lives alone with her father, an absentminded inventor of extraordinary but useless things. When Harriet’s father tells her one day that she has five aunts–his sisters–that he’s never told her about before, and with whom he tragically lost touch in childhood, Harriet is delighted, and determined to track down each of her colourful aunts one-by-one. Will Harriet Bean be able to reunite her father and his sisters–Veronica, Harmonica, Majolica, and the twins, Japonica and Thessalonika?

“Strangely enough, I didn’t even know I had any aunts until I was nine. Then, quite out the blue, my father said to me one day:

‘Your aunts would like to hear about that!’

I forget what it was my aunts would have liked to hear about–I was so astonished to hear that they even existed.

‘Aunts?’ I said in surprise. ‘What aunts?’

‘Oh,’ said my father, rather vaguely, as if it weren’t at all important. ‘All those aunts of yours. You know–my sisters. All those aunts you have.’”
–Excerpt from The Lost Five Aunts of Harriet Bean

About this title

About the Author:

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and of The Sunday Philosophy Club series. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and was a law professor at the University of Botswana and at Edinburgh University. He lives in Scotland.

Laura Rankin has illustrated several picture books, including The Wriggly, Wriggly Baby, The Handmade Alphabet, which won a Boston Globe — Horn Book Honor, and Rabbit Ears. She lives in York Beach, Maine.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 2-4–An offhand comment from her father sets nine-year-old Harriet Bean on the path of finding the five aunts whom she has never known. This seems like the perfect start of a juicy family mystery but it never quite turns into one. When given the full story of her father's loss of his five older sisters and a clue to the whereabouts of one of them, Harriet embarks on a hasty journey of collection. Useful coincidences make the women ridiculously easy to locate; it also helps that the final two are mind readers and come seeking her. The real mystery is how the father can possibly be absentminded enough to misplace five sisters. All of them are likable characters with interesting personality quirks and gadgets: strong-woman Veronica uses pedal power to drive her circus trailer from city to city, and twin detectives Thessalonika and Japonica are masters of disguise with convincing costumes. It is these two who give Harriet the chance to solve a mystery in the sequel, which takes place at a racetrack's stables. Masquerading as a jockey, Harriet is confronted with a villain who uses glue to stick a horse's feet to the floor so that he won't run well the next day. It's contrived stuff such as this that takes most of the charm out of this easy chapter-book series.–Kathleen Meulen, Blakely Elementary School, Bainbridge Island, WA
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About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0676977766
• ISBN 13: 9780676977769
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96
• Illustrator: Rankin Laura