About book Sammy Keyes And The Art Of Deception (2003)
I really like the Sammy Keyes books. They are fun reading, and Sammy always is able to solve the mystery before anyone else, even though she's only 12 years old.Sammy doesn't know who her dad is and her mom decided she wanted to be a famous actress and abandoned Sammy. Sammy lives with her grandma in a high rise, senior citizens' apartment where they don't allow children. So she has to sneak up to the apartment by the fire escape, sleep on the couch, and hide in the closet when anyone comes to the door. She is a tomboy who loves her skateboard and high tops and refuses to be seen in a dress.In this book, she must do a report for her art class. Hudson, her grandmother's boyfriend (sort of), takes her and Grandma to an art gallery where Sammy falls in love with Diane Reijden's paintings. A robber tries to steal some of them, and Sammy tackles him. He gets away, but leaves the paintings. So now it's Sammy's job to not only find the robber, but find who he is working with. It could be Diane herself--looking for publicity. It could be one of the other artists or even the manager of the gallery. Or maybe he's working alone. Through Sammy's super sleuthing, she is able to discover who the real fraud and bad guy is.Not only is the book a cute mystery, but it also is a good study in human nature, both of adults and seventh graders.
I've been meaning to pick up one of these books forever (those be some catchy covers), but never really got to it. Sammy Keyes is a rather appealing snazzy-speaking tween protagonist: skateboarding, making box-mac-and-cheese-and-salsa, and of course, being a nosy mystery-uncover-er. It's all in the mold of some noir mystery but modern with relatable struggles for Sammy (incomprehensibleness of teachers, absentee mom, secretly living with grandma to not violate senior-living-only arrangement, first crush) handled deftly. And I always think feminism is a winner.Really, I enjoyed a visit her stylized (but still believable) and rich world, populated by a cast of colorful supporting characters. And particularly the snappy dialogue. But I think the book suffers a bit from what I'll call "series-itus". Status quo is god, and ultimately, I'm not sure a whole lot of actually happens to the characters- not of any lasting importance anyway. A bigger problem is probably that the central mystery is a dud, although it allows some nice contemplation of the subjectivity of art.Will I read another Sammy Keyes mystery? Probably not, but it wasn't a bad way to spend a hour. Rating: 2.5/5 stars
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Miss. Kuskowski, Sammy's art teacher, assigns an assignment for the class to research an artist and explain why or why not they like the artist's work. Sammy tells her friend Hudson about the project and Hudson decides to take Sammy and Sammy's grandmother to an art gallery to help Sammy with her assignment. At the art gallery one artist amazes Sammy with her work. After looking at the paintings, she wanted to look at them again and again. Sammy looked deep in the paintings. They just made her happy. After staring at them for a while, a thief breaks into the art gallery, holding a gun. The thief stole a few of the paintings that Sammy adored. Just as the thief was leaving, Sammy tackled him down because she had realized that water was dripping out of the gun and that it was just a fake gun. Sammy saved all the pictures, but the thief ran away. All this was just the beginning of Sammy's adventure. This book expressed Sammy's feelings about art. It was very interesting and had a shocking ending.
—Nazik
One of my favorite Sammy's yet. A lot of humor in this one; humor and tangled romance, but I don't want to give anything away. I wouldn't want to start the series here, but I'm sure glad I've read through this far! Although these aren't "Great Literature," they sure are fun reading. Looking forward to get to the next one. You'd think that with this many books in a series, they would become hopelessly redundant and repetitive, but somehow there are enough fresh twists and turns in each one to keep the fun going.
—Steve Clark
