The Secret Letters Review

 

Another great book by Margaret Peterson Haddix!

The Secret Letters follows two preteens, Colin and Navaeh. Colin's single mother works as a consultant to help people tidy up their homes and remove and sell clutter. Navaeh's dad is the total opposite: he is known as the "Junk King" in their small town and buys old junk from people and keeps all of it. Their parents are huge business rivals! 

Navaeh's dad gets called to buy out the stuff in the storage unit for a guy named Arthur Mongold. But when Navaeh and her whole family get there, the storage unit is empty! Except for a single letter. Navaeh's dad assumes Colin's mother must've stolen everything. His family tells him not to jump to conclusions and they will try to figure out where the Mongold's stuff went, and who wrote the mysterious letter that was left.

One day, Colin, his mother, and three teenagers she hired are cleaning out one house when Colin discovers a shoebox underneath the floorboard in the attic. The shoebox is filled with letters from someone named Toby, who grew up during the 1970s. Colin reads the letters and sees they were all addressed to someone named Rosemary. Colin gets curious and tries to find where Rosemary's old house was so they can read her letters. 

As it turns out, the day Colin finds and goes to Rosemary's old house, it happens to be right next to house Navaeh and her family were called in to clean out. Colin bumps into Naveah without her family looking, and he tells her about what he found. They then go to the correct house where a woman named Mrs. Torres lives. Navaeh already knew her because sometimes she babysits her babies who are twins. When the kids get permission to look around her attic, they find Rosemary's letters! 

For the rest of the book, Colin and Navaeh become friends and try to figure out where are Rosemary and Toby are now, why they stopped talking to each other, reunite them, and what connection they might have to the Mongold's storage unit being empty. They do all of this while trying not to let their parents find out.  They also learn a lot about pop culture from the 1970s through the letters.

Yeah, this was such a fascinating book! MPH writes the best mystery novels. The way the two mysteries in this book come together is mindblowing. And in typical MPH fashion, she talks about serious topics in a way children can understand, mostly later in the book.

I gave it 5 stars. I am excited to read the next two books!