The Clock Without a Face
Scott Teplin, Mac Barnett, and Eli Horowitz
McSweeneys, 2010
$19.95, Board Book
978-1934781715
April 16th, 2012
Genre:
Mystery
Age: 8+
Description:
Gus Twintig, assistant to the famous detective, Roy Dodge, has been called up
to investigate a theft. Bevel Ternky, the owner of a 13-floor apartment
building, has had a robbery—someone broke in and stole the 12 priceless numbers
off of a clock in his safe. The especially odd thing—all the tenants of the 13
apartments were also burglarized! Roy and Gus start making their way down to the
first floor to see if they can solve the mystery of who stole the clock
numbers.
Opinion:
This is an interesting book. It is made from board book materials and is
rectangular in shape with a triangular top to resemble the building. It is also
very interactive. Roy
is good at asking questions of the tenants while Gus is good at drawing all the
rooms in lots of detail. So while they explore all the apartments and owners
Gus makes drawings of the rooms. On the left-hand side of the book is the text
from the interviews while the right-hand side features Gus’s drawings. It is up
to the reader to determine where the numbers are. The culprit is discovered in
the end, but no other answers are given. I guess this is because the authors
actually commissioned real numbers to be made and they hid them around the
Untied States. The clues to their locations are hidden within the pictures. To
date, 11 of the numbers have been found. I would have liked the other clues to
have had their answers printed in the back of the book. For example, all
tenants had something stolen from them that was then hidden in another tenant’s
apartment. You could literally spend hours searching for these items. An answer
key for these clues would have been nice for those who would have gotten frustrated.
Not having some of the answers given kind of makes the mystery incomplete and
the reader left with a sense of having wasted their time.
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