I’m not usually one to have much to say about middle-grade literature, but the first book in a new series is so much fun, I want to let everyone know that it’s coming. The series is The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency by Jordan Stratford, and HighBridge has rights to all three books. The first is The Case of the Missing Moonstone, and it’s a book that former English-major parents will delight in reading right along with their middle-grade child. It takes place in London, 1826, and unites, in a slight but wonderful temporal mash-up, eleven-year-old Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and a math genius credited with being the first computer scientist, with fourteen-year-old Mary Godwin, later Shelley, author of Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus. The two form the secretive Wollstonecraft Detective Agency in order to unravel the mystery of a stolen heirloom and expose a false confession. The prose is witty, whimsical, fast-paced, and humorous throughout, teeming with clever word-play, while the story abounds with literary and historical references and features cameo appearances from childhood versions of other famous literary figures. The Case of the Missing Moonstone is coming in January 2015 and will be followed in August of that year by The Case of the Girl in Gray, and if you haven’t yet picked up on the literary references in those two titles, it’s time for you to review that syllabus from your Nineteenth Century British Novel class! (Or you could just click on the hyperlinks, I suppose.)