Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | We the Children | 2010 | Andrew Clements | Buy |
| 2 | Fear Itself | 2011 | Andrew Clements | Buy |
| 3 | The Whites of Their Eyes | 2011 | Andrew Clements | Buy |
| 4 | In Harm’s Way | 2013 | Andrew Clements | Buy |
| 5 | We Hold These Truths | 2013 | Andrew Clements | Buy |
When Ben Pratt learns that his school, a 200-year-old building on the New England coast, is about to be sold and turned into an amusement park, he has just twenty-eight days to find a way to stop it. A dying janitor hands him a clue, and what follows is a chase through the school’s history, architecture, and hidden spaces as Ben and his friend Jill try to unravel what the school’s original founders intended to protect. Each book in the series is fast and suspenseful, built around a single stretch of those twenty-eight days.
Andrew Clements structured the series around American history and civic ideals. The five book titles, We the Children, Fear Itself, The Whites of Their Eyes, In Harm’s Way, and We Hold These Truths, all reference famous American phrases, and the series quietly asks questions about what institutions are worth protecting and why. The history is woven in naturally rather than delivered as a lesson, and most readers will absorb it without feeling like they are studying.
The books are aimed at readers in roughly grades three through five and move at a pace closer to a thriller than most middle-grade fiction. Clements wrote the whole arc before the first book came out, so the mystery holds together well from start to finish, with payoffs for readers who notice details early in the series.