FernFolio

ARE YOU A GIFTED CHILD LOOKING FOR SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES?  The ad, which appears in the local newspaper, catches Reynard Muldoon’s eye.  The eleven-year old, who is constantly taunted and ridiculed by the other children because of his exceptional intelligence, has completed every class and read every book in the Stonetown Orphanage.  Even his kind tutor, Miss Perumal, admits that there is nothing further she can teach him.
So with Miss Perumal’s encouragement, Reynie replies to the ad, and is directed to a downtown building to complete the first of three examinations that test both his intellectual skills, and his moral fibre.  He meets the brilliant and timid George “Sticky” Washington, also eleven, Kate Wetherall, twelve, whose has spent years with the circus and can measure any distance with a look, and the small and belligerently obstinate Constance Contraire.  Along with them, he is taken to meet Mr. Benedict, an odd, genial and green plaid-clad genius who offers them the chance to become secret agents, and carry out a very dangerous mission whose outcome quite possibly will decide the future of every human on Earth.  They become the Mysterious Benedict Society.
Mr. Benedict and his team explain to the children that they have detected and are tracking strange messages being transmitted subliminally during regular television and radio broadcasts.  The messages, which are delivered by children, seem to consist of nonsensical statements … THE MISSING AREN’T MISSING, THEY’RE ONLY DEPARTED…  POISON APPLES.  POISON WORMS…  The messages vary, but they appear to cloud the mind of just about everyone who hears them.  The international Emergency that has dominated news headlines for months seems to have been created by these messages, and Mr. Benedict can only speculate, and worry, about what the ultimate purpose of these messages might be.
Mr. Benedict’s team has tracked the messages to the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, founded by a Dutch scientist named Ledroptha Curtain, which is situated on Nomansan Island, just across from Stonetown Harbor.  The four children are enrolled as students at the Institute and soon find themselves learning a series bewilderingly contradictory school rules, and learning lessons that, at least initially, appear to make no sense whatsoever.  But the members of the Mysterious Benedict Society meet in secret after lights out every night, to discuss their findings, and to report those findings to Mr. Benedict’s team by flashlight and Morse code, and slowly, horrifyingly, start to make sense of Ledroptha Curtain’s plans.
The Mysterious Benedict Society is a thrilling adventure story about four solitary and abandoned children who discover that, by pooling their talents and working together, they can achieve the impossible.  It is a tale full of mazes, puzzles and riddles that will have the reader working hard along side Reynie, Sticky, Kate and Constance to figure things out before it’s too late.  Trenton Lee Stewart’s book is the first in a series of (almost) three titles, which include The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, and the forthcoming The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
FernFolio Editor