Everything having to do with magicians is a bit mysterious. So when one magician dies and two kids go looking for answers about his death, it's not surprising that mysterious things start to happen.

First there is a Symphony of Smells. Then the kids stop at the magician's underground home and have a run-in with a not-so-nice couple. Deciphering coded clues they find along the way leads the kids into more trouble. (The author helpfully includes an appendix filled with useful information, including how to figure out codes and perform magic tricks.)

The best part of this book is the narrator. The reader doesn't know who that all-knowing person is, but it seems that he (or she) is an important character, too. Part of the mystery is figuring out what role the narrator plays in the story.

-- The Washington Post

'Take a Seat -- Make a Stand: A Hero in the Family' by Amy Nathan

(Ages 9 to 12)

Sarah Keys made newspaper headlines in 1955 but has been overlooked by history. Even her great- niece, Krystal Hargrave, didn't know about her story until she had to do a "hero project" in fifth grade.

Krystal's grandmother suggested that she write about her Aunt Sarah, and then told her this story:

In 1952 Sarah Keys was a young Women's Army Corps private. On a bus trip home to North Carolina, the driver demanded that she give up her seat and go sit in the back with the other African-Americans.

This was common in the South in those days: Blacks were told what they could and could not do by so-called Jim Crow laws.

Keys was just 22 and very shy but also very brave. When she refused to move, she was arrested and jailed. A young African-American lawyer took her case, which led to a November 1955 decision by government officials that it was against the law to restrict, because of race, where people could sit on trains and buses traveling from one state to another.

The decision was announced a week before a young African-American woman in Montgomery, Ala., refused to give up her seat on a city bus. Her name was Rosa Parks. Civil rights workers rallied to her cause, which is why we know her name but not that of Sarah Keys (who later married and became Sarah Keys Evans).

Yet, as this book makes clear, both women -- the one who became famous and the one who did not -- were heroes in the civil rights struggle.

-- Marylou Tousignant, The Washington Post