Middle Grade Mystery / 60k Words
12-year-old Sydney Chilcoat excels at a lot of things–academics, emergency preparedness, quietly fading into the woodwork. Social activities are not her forte, so this relaxed last week of the school year has been an anxiety-fueled nightmare. Now the only thing standing between Sydney and summer vacation is a “fun” field trip to the beach with a sea of bewildering seventh graders and a best friend who’s growing tired of being her life preserver.
At the beach, a classmate’s bracelet goes missing, and Sydney finds herself inadvertently enmeshed in the drama. She realizes this is finally her chance to prove she’s capable of something besides scoring a good grade on a group assignment. Sydney has seen every episode of Claudia Kay and secretly writes fanfiction about the amateur sleuth–nobody on this beach is more qualified to solve a mystery! But if Sydney’s going to pull off this investigation, she can’t be afraid of making a few waves–even if the evidence points to the last person she wants to accuse.
INSPIRATION:
When I was in middle school, we usually spent the last week of school doing various fun activities after we finished our final exams. I hated it! I had selective mutism as a kid, which is an anxiety disorder that rendered me utterly incapable of speaking at school. So during fun activities, I had to just…stand around and be weird and silent. One fun activity was a field trip to the beach, where I ended up hanging out with my neighbor who was a year older than me. I knew her outside of school, so I was able to speak to her, but it was still awkward hanging out with her friends who I didn’t know well. I always thought this beach day would be a fun setting for a novel, but it wasn’t until I came up with the idea of the missing bracelet that the plot fell into place. During the real beach day, there were about six or eight girls who were all inadvertently wearing identical bikinis, and I remember it being a hot topic of conversation. I used this detail for the novel and those girls all became suspects.