'Bernice Peppercorn’s imagination fills her mind and her notebooks with adventure and intrigue. She sees crimes where there are none and races to the local police station daily to fulfil her civic duty. When a real robbery is committed in town, Bernice dives into detective mode and stumbles across vital clues that could help find the thieves. No one believes her except Ike, a one-legged fisherman who lives down at the wharf.'
There's a level of fun to children's books that just seems to be missing from adult books, a sense of whimsy where even the most mundane thing is exciting or amusing that goes away as the target audience gets older. This is one of the things that's just so refreshing and enjoyable about Bernice Takes A Plunge, the silliness, the earnestness, and sheer joy that permeates almost every page.
The story follows the adventures of Bernice Peppercorn, a girl who's obsessed with mysteries. She wants to write mystery stories, having been inspired by the local celebrity Crystal Bell, who stars in a number of blockbuster mystery adventure films. She uses her everyday life to inspire her stories, coming up with ideas for adventures by the things she sees, unfortunately, her desire to find an interesting story can sometimes get her in a bit of trouble.
Bernice is known to the local police, not for being a trouble maker though, but for the exact opposite, for thinking everything she sees is part of a bigger mystery, and that there's always a crime afoot. We see this first hand a couple of times when she thinks that someone is trying to detonate a car bomb when she sees a young man with a remote control in the car park (he's just playing with a remote control car), and when she gets the police to investigate when a local woman goes missing and her house is a mess (she was just in the garden at the time). Bernice's heart is always in the right place, but she doesn't always seem to slow down and think before jumping in to save the day.
Fortunately for her, a real crime does happen when Crystal Bell's mansion is broken into and her jewellery is stolen. Now Bernice has a real crime to investigate, something that she knows isn't just her imagination. But who could possibly be behind the crime? Her first suspect, the strange new fisherman Ike who has just recently moved to town.
One of the things that I love about Bernice is that she's a little all over the place. Her mission is to try and find these stolen objects and solve the mystery, but boy does she get distracted a lot. Even when she's investigating her suspect Ike she goes a little off track. She sees he's got a wooden leg, and starts wondering what it would be like to walk around on it, so ends up strapping her leg up behind her and sticking a plunger on her knee so that she can walk around on a peg leg. This isn't the only time that something like this happens either, and it quickly becomes clear that Bernice is always getting distracted, forgetting things, and making silly mistakes.
I don't know if it was written this way purposely or not, and I'd love to ask Ann Harth about this, but the way Bernice acts reminds me a lot of ADHD. The way she has hyper fixations on certain things, yet can't seem to keep her focus on stuff, failing to read instructions fully because she just wants to get things done, losing stuff because she can't remember where she put it; it all reminds me of ADHD. In a lot of ways she's very similar to my wife, who has it, and I loved seeing a neurodivergent lead character, especially in a kid's book.
Like I said, I don't know if she was intentionally written this way, but even if she wasn't I'd like to think that people with ADHD, both adult and kids, would be able to read this book and see a bit of themselves reflected in Bernice. Everyone should get the chance to feel represented in media, and to have a lead with these kind of traits, who isn't treated as different and is able to solve the mystery and save the day is definitely a great thing.
Bernice is a really engaging and fun lead character, one that I enjoyed spending some time with. I loved her sense of wonder at things, of her desire to ask questions and to try new experiences. She seemed to have a lust for life and an energy that a lot of leads don't have, and it was enjoyable reading a character who's just having fun. I hope that this won't be the last we see of Bernice, and that we can get to see her tackle some more mysteries in the future.
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