Another great numerous mystery novel for 9-12 year-olds that blends friendship, family and humor.

I would love to share The Great Mistake Mysteries series with my niece in fourth grade. She's a little nervous about scary things but this series (and story) is gentle enough she'd feel safe. It's also interesting enough she'd have a lot of questions and theories about what's happening and what's going to happen. A LOT!

In The Artsy Mistake Mystery, Stephen and Renee are pulled into another mystery. Art all over their neighbourhood is disappearing, from the grumpy windower's mailbox (his wife painted it) to fish decorated by Stephen's school to a weird little garden gnome. Actually, even Stephen wants the garden gnome but he would never steal it! The neighbour's would notice... Renee is sure she knows how to out the culprits but Stephen isn't so sure she knows the whole story yet. Does he?

Super cute mystery starring Stephen, a guy who uses his OCD as an opportunity for growth: He counts his mistakes in order to learn from them. In this book, outdoor art begins to disappear. Though the culprit seems to be Attila-Renee's brother--suspicion also falls on Stephen himself. As storylines converge, the climax occurs at Burlington Art Gallery's award ceremony.

I can't wait to place this on the hands of my sixth graders!

This was a really cute story. It takes place in Burlington, about an hour south of Toronto. I’ve never read a story set there, so that was really different for me.

I liked how the dog walking was so prominent in the story. It shows Stephen and Renee working and earning money, which will make them well rounded kids. We also see some of the challenges they face, when Stephen is reported to Animal Control.

Mistakes are a big part in this book. The chapters are divided between the mistakes that Stephen notices him and other people making throughout the day. Sometimes he realizes something was a mistake after it’s happened and it’s too late to change it. This story demonstrates that everyone makes mistakes, and that’s okay.

This was a clever mystery. Many pieces of art disappear from the neighbourhood. There isn’t one obvious culprit, since there are multiple victims.

This is a great Canadian book for middle grade readers.

Renee's brother has been accused of stealing art in the neighborhood, and Renee enlists the help of her friend Stephen to prove her brother's innocence.

I loved the format of the book... "Day 1 Mistake 1"... we all have those days, it made me laugh out loud. The writing was excellent, and the story just kept moving. A good choice for upper elementary readers who love a good mystery!

Unable to review as didn't read- reading level too low for my students.

The young children, Stephen and Renée, are back as the pair of mismatched dog walkers and part-time amateur detectives. Renée is the sparkly know-it-all, and Stephen is the worry-wort, who spends his days listing all the mistakes he, and those around him make, while trying to expand his father’s dog-walking business. Ping and Pong are the dogs that are their particular responsibility. Stephen sees the dogs’ personalities as mirroring him and Renée: “She’s also yappy, like Ping, always with one more thing to add or bark about. I’m more like Pong, tall and quiet. Just not quite as calm”.
Although Renée is the brains of the pair, it is Stephen who seems to pay more attention in class. A language lesson prompts Stephen to point out to the reader, whenever he uses a simile or metaphor: “We sit through a class on metaphors and similes, which is as much fun as a barrel of puppies (that’s a simile, by the way)”; “I can feel my heart turn into a giant turnip that pushes against my ribs and throat, the vines growing out of it are going to choke me. And, yes, that’s a metaphor”. Similarly, a lesson on estimation comes in handy for working out the number of feet on fifty-one smuggled turtles: “If I estimate the way Mrs Worsley taught us by dropping the one and multiplying by four, that makes two hundred little green feet clawing at his leg the whole time”. Renée, does not like estimation, as surely the accurate answer would be much more correct.
There are two major incidents that require the pair to put on their investigative shoes. First, Mr Rupert’s prized letterbox has gone missing. Soon other items start disappearing around town – a garden gnome called Grumpy, a Halloween doll, and, most importantly for the children, the ‘Stream of Dreams’ wooden fish used to decorate the school fence. Also, odd bits of art are turning up on the pavement as part of the recycling drive – curiouser and curiouser! Unfortunately, the town’s main suspect is Renée’s surly brother, Attila. Renée knows he is not guilty, and drags Stephen in to prove his innocence – Stephen is not quite so sure. The second major incident is that their school goes into lockdown, as a gun is discovered on the premises.
Suspicions are aroused, Stephen and Renée go on midnight reconnaissance missions to uncover the truth, Ping and Pong are in danger (again), and the children make some startling discoveries about several of the adults in town. Everything comes to a head at the prize giving evening at the Burlington Art Gallery, where Renée has convinced all the suspects and interested parties to gather, so that she can – in the manner of all good detectives – expose the wrong-doers.
I loved this book. The characters are wonderful – especially (but not only) Stephen and Renée. The town of Burlington has a diverse population of nice, friendly people – the types you would like to have as your neighbours. The mysteries are well thought out, and keep your interest, but there are no serious crimes, no violence. Just a lovely, cosy town going about its business – with a few misunderstandings to keep life from becoming boring.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

The review copy had some major issues, but I worked around these and this does not factor into my negative review of this book. Yes, negative. I'm sorry and I wish the author all the best in this series, but it wasn't quite there for me, even when I viewed it through middle-grade lenses. While I'm not a series fan, I think this one has potential, but this volume (the middle of three in the series s far as I know) just didn't get it done for me.

This book is told from the perspective of Stephen Noble, who walks dogs to help out his father's business. If we were to categorize his parents by traditional 'roles', then Stephen's father was more like a mom and his mom more like a dad given his dad's interest in knitting and other traditionally female pursuits, and his mom's traveling for her job, but this felt to me to be more like a novelty add-in for effect than a serious attempt at depicting equality or parents outside of traditional roles, but they were relatively minor characters, so this really wasn't a big deal.

Stephen's best friend is Renée Kobai. As is usual in these stories, I found the side-kick - Renée - to be far more interesting than ever Stephen was. The problem with Stephen (apart from his foolish willingness to do highly risky if not downright dangerous things, such as trying to follow suspected criminals at midnight) was his obsession with these two dogs, Ping and Pong. It was honestly really irritating, and the number of times the dogs are mentioned was nauseating. I kept asking, "Is this about these two dogs or about art theft?!" because it honestly felt like the plot was taking a back seat to the minutiae of the dogs walking, and sniffing, and barking, and whatever.

The story was supposed to be about the inexplicable disappearance of various items of 'outdoor art' such as the mailbox of Stephen's next-door-neighbor, which was designed to look like a house, and the vanishing decorative fish from the fence around Stephen and Renée's school. The problem was that there never really was any plot!

The story sort of meandered around without any real detective work being done, and it was so obsessed with these two dogs, which Stephen seemed to be walking full time non-stop, that I rapidly lost interest - and I actually like dogs! After about the fifty percent mark I began skimming the story, reading bits here and there, and it was not improving. By seventy-five percent I'd lost even a pretense of interest in it and wanted to move onto something which would actually keep my attention, and not annoy me! I'm sorry, but life is too short for this kind of a novel to occupy any significant amount of it.

There were instances of children lying to adults and getting away with it, and for no good reason. I know children do lie, but to promote this as a real option in life is a mistake in a children's novel, especially when there are no consequences for it.

Worse than this though, at one point Stephen tells us, "I think I've seen enough rescue videos that I can use CPR to bring him back to life if I have to." This is a serious no-no. You cannot do CPR unless you are properly trained, and to suggest to children that you can see it in a video and then just leap in and do it, is excusable, especially in a children's book! You can do serious harm to someone if you try CPR without knowing properly what you are supposed to do, and this alone should disqualify this book from a positive rating. I found it dispiriting that no other reviewers seemed to find a problem with this.

The writing aside, there were serious technical problems with the crappy Kindle app version of this novel and the problems were the same whether I looked at this on my phone or on a tablet computer. Almost every instance of the letters 'T' and 'H' like in 'they' and 'this' and so on, were missing. Also every instance of two 'F's together, like in the word 'off', were missing, so the word was just the letter 'O'. Also missing were combinations of 'F' and 'L', and 'F' and 'I'!. It was weird.

I encountered something like this in another book which I read in Kindle's crappy app a long time ago. Why it happens, I do not know. There must be some glitch when converting to Kindle, I guess, but Kindle's app is substandard anyway in my opinion. I'd much rather read in Bluefire reader, Adobe Digital Editions, or the Nook app, all of which put Kindle to shame. Here are some examples of the missing letters:

"the moment her older brother, Attila, takes o for class" (takes off for class)
"It'll be the rst one I make" (first one I make)
"ey scramble ahead of me like mismatched horses pulling a carriage: Ping, a scruy pony;" (they scramble...scruffy pony)
"make the dogs walk to the le of me" (left of me)
"He is out walking his ve Yorkie" (No idea what that's supposed to be!)
"is junk slows us down" (this junk)
"with some kind of ller." (filler)
"e sunlight glints o the diamond stud in her nose as she pulls the ugliest wall plaque I've ever seen from someone's pile of junk. It's a large grey sh, mouth open, pointy teeth drawn, mounted on a at slab of glossy wood. Maybe Ping is growling at the sh, not the girl."
"e sh is bent as though it's wriggling in a stream." (the fish)
She looks from the sh to me. "Oh, not for me. e plaque is for my prof. ey're redecorating the sta lounge."

One of these was unintentionally hilarious, and might well be deemed so by middle grade boys at least: "I don't want to be caught with sh in my pants." It was meant to be (I'm assuming!) "I don't want to be caught with fish in my pants." All this talk of fish, by the way, was from a set of carved wooden sharks that like the dogs, frankly featured too largely in the story.

Had the novel been better, these problems were ignorable (it's surprising how much sense you can make of a sentence which is missing letters!), but as it was, they simply added to the negative overall impression I was already getting from the story itself, so I cannot recommend it.

This book is the second of the Great Mistake Mysteries series, though it could stand alone. Stephen is our first-person narrator, a boy who lives with his dad and shares a family dog-walking business. His buddy, a girl named Renée, also helps.

In this story, Renée's tough-looking and tough-talking brother Attila is being accused of stealing many outdoor artworks from around their neighborhood. Stephen and Renée think he’s getting an unfair rap, and set out to find the true culprit.

Stephen is very careful, a kid with OCD who has learned to manage: he counts his mistakes, and tries to see how each one can turn out to be useful.

Things turn scary when a gun is found. And when Stephen is falsely accused. But our heroes prevail, their friendship proving to be strong enough for them to trust one another.

The story is so sweet at its heart, full of friendship, happy dogs, and kids who gain agency by being smart and dedicated. The writing is assured, and the pace even faster than in the first book.

This is a thoroughly fun middle-grade adventure, with a boy and a girl being good buddies with no other expectations. Stephen and Renée are in seventh grade, but I think the fourth through sixth graders would love it—especially as kids at that age usually read up.

Art of all kinds is disappearing from the neighborhood. As Stephen collects his daily quota of mistakes, he also tries to find out who's behind the strange happenings, even as he fears the culprit is his friend Renee's brother. The second in the Great Mistakes Mystery series is an enjoyable middle grade read. Recommended where mysteries are popular.

This book is a cute follow-up to the previous mistake mystery. Stephen and Renee have to discover who has been stealing art from around the neighborhood and clear Renee’s brother Attila’s name. Just as in the previous book, The Artsy Mistake Mystery shows how Stephen gains control of his anxiety by counting his and others’ mistakes and by realizing that it’s okay to make them.

I received this book from NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

Having read The Best Mistake Mystery last summer, I was thrilled to find this book available on NetGalley and I knew I had to read this sequel, too.

From what I gather, only a week has passed since the events from the first book, but there aren't many tie-ins or references to the previous case. The characters are the same, centering on Stephen and Renee, with a couple of interesting additions, who all, at one time or another, become suspects.

The mystery consists of someone stealing art of and by the people of Burlington. Things get up close and personal when Stephen's favourite dog-walking customer gets threatened in the process. He and Renee yet again team up and find the convict, but not without making many, many mistakes along the way.

I thoroughly enjoyed this middle grade novel, because it reminds me of the mystery books I used to read as a child. They always featured a group of friends fighting for justice in their small community, and this is no exception. Stephen and Renee may not have a large group of friends, but they have each other and their platonic relationship was another thing I really liked about this concept. To be honest, I thought they were even younger, but apparently they are already in the 7th grade.

I liked book 1 and enjoyed book 2 even more. There are characters from book 1 and the introduction of new ones. The story is unique and enjoyable. I'm looking forward to book 3.

I received this ARC copy from Net Galley for my honest review.

This book is the second in the Great Mistake Mysteries Series. It is another wonderful read from Sylvia McNicoll. This is a wonderful book in an amazing series. Currently it is book 2 of a planned trilogy but after reading the first two I hope it goes well beyond the three planned volumes. In my review of volume 1: The Best Mistake Mystery I stated that in some ways it reads like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon but written for kids. And that feeling in many ways is even stronger after reading this volume. The story is wonderfully written and the pace of this volume is a little quicker than the first book. Again one of the greatest strengths of this book is our main characters; Stephen Nobel and Renée Kobai. It is great to watch them grow and mature.

In this book both Stephen and Renee are still working on growing their friendship. And finding ways to deal with the stress they each have in their life. Family stress, school stress, and stress from just being kids goring up. Local art starts disappearing. From painted mailboxes, to fish on the kindergarten wall. But more than that is going on. Stephen has a run in with kids in black caps. A gun is found in the school and the whole neighbourhood soon seems to be on alert, and more than a little anxious and nervous. But Being a little obsessive compulsive Stephen cannot just let it go. And as more things go missing life becomes more complicated, for Stephen is accused of the thefts and someone even claims to have video evidence. Throw in a little blackmail, interrogations from the police and you have a mystery with a bit of everything.

This story has a number of themes, first is the theme of friendship. Second t deals with Stephen's obsessions in a great way. There is also the theme of the value of art. And also the importance and impact that art can have on people.

Can Stephen and Renee figure it out again, or will then end up taking the fall for something they did not do? To find out you will need to read the book.

I absolutely loved this book and am anxiously awaiting the third installment. It is an excellent read, and my younger two children loved it. My son could not stop talking about the book for about a week after we read it, so the art of Sylvia's words also leave an impact and have an influence on the readers. An excellent read it a great series so give it a try I am sure you will be entertained!

A mystery that would appeal to young children or early preteens. I liked the main characters and their quirky personalities. It was nice to see their friendship grow. Having a dad who cooks and knits and a mom who travels for work was interesting and current. How refreshing too see a children's book about art in a way that was matter-of-fact, not didactic.

One difficulty I had with the book was that I felt the children behaved way younger than their age. (Is 7th grade different in Canada?) Why was the math curriculum so low-level? It also bothered me that both children and adults would do and say things that would never be choices in real life. Are there no consequences for lying and stealing?

Stephen Noble and Renée Kobai are friends from school, they help each other out with dog walking and mystery solving; I like that seventh graders are portrayed enjoying a normal platonic friendship - although it bothered me that they were learning how to round numbers in math class to make subtraction easier, because that's what 3rd graders do. I do like that Stephen's dad cooks healthy meals with the family's help and I also like that the Kobai family's Hungarian cultural differences are mentioned in a frank, descriptive manner (the way they roll their R's, their formality and strictness are observed but not judgmentally). What bothered me was the kids and adults alike telling white lies, massaging truth, and selectively revealing only partial truths to each other and authority figures throughout this book.