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Room One: A Mystery or Two | 
| Author: Andrew Clements
Creator: Mark Elliott
Publisher: Aladdin
Category: Book
List Price: $5.99
Buy New: $2.28
You Save: $3.71 (62%)
New (30) Used (5) from $2.28
Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 12277
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.2 x 0.5
ISBN: 0689866879
EAN: 9780689866876
ASIN: 0689866879
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New and Factory Sealed Item Fast Shipping
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Product Description
Ted Hammond loves a good mystery, and in the spring of his fifth-grade year, he's working on a big one. How can his school in the little town of Plattsford stay open next year if there are going to be only five students? Out here on the Great Plains in western Nebraska, everyone understands that if you lose the school, you lose the town.But the mystery that has Ted's full attention at the moment is about that face, the face he sees in the upper window of the Andersons' house as he rides past on his paper route. The Andersons moved away two years ago, and their old farmhouse is empty, boarded up tight. At least it's supposed to be. A shrinking school in a dying town. A face in the window of an empty house. At first these facts don't seem to be related. But Ted Hammond learns that in a very small town, there's no such thing as an isolated event. And the solution of one mystery is often the beginning of another.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Room One August 7, 2008
Longtime Clements reader and I have to say, this book is just horrible. It's completely lacking all of the charm we have come to know and love from all of his other books, and I don't understand where that disappeared to. Before you say, well, maybe you're just too old for the books now, I'd just like to say that I still read Frindle and the School Story and others, and they're still as good as when I first read them, if not better.
There's almost no character interaction or character development. It's simply boring.
The cultural references also threw me off, they're supposed to be timeless stories, not stories with iPods and Gameboys and wars in Iraq. They should be happening to anyone, anywhere.
I just didn't like the tone. It's nothing like his old works. If you're a fan of the classic Clements books, I strongly recommend you spare yourself a few minutes and pick another Andrew Clements book to read, cause this one's just not worth it.
 Book Review by Brooke July 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ted Hammond is a boy who loves mystery books. He goes to a school with only one room and one teacher and three of four grades. Ted is the only one who is in sixth grade.
I think you should read this book because you have to think about it carefully. And you solve mysteries. Some mysteries that are going the right way go the wrong way at the end. Is the school going to stay open or not?
 Room One A Mystery or Two May 21, 2008
Room One a Mystery or Two is a very good story. It was a quick read that kept you guessing. Ted Hammond, the only sixth grader in his school, loves nothing better than a good mystery. He can usually solve them before the author does in the story. So he has learned a lot of tricks from the best detectives. Ted now has two real life mysteries to solve. How can he save his one room school from being shut down? And who was the girl he saw in the window of the abandoned house? I enjoyed the story and was surprised by the ending.
On another note, as a teacher I would like to use this in my fourth grade class to teach making inferences. The author does a very nice job explaining how Ted drew the conclusions that he did. Mr. Clements also showed how Ted made connections text-to-world and text-to-self. I can't wait to incorporate this into a unit next year.
An okay story January 18, 2008
Andrew Clements is an amazing author. I didn't feel that Room One was one of his best, however. It was okay. There were a few exciting parts, but it wasn't as satisfying as I thought it would be. It's a great mystery, but I don't think the characters are that well-developed. Again, like most of Clement's children books, it's about an ordinary kid who makes a difference in the world.
Room One: A Mystery or Two September 11, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
So it's time for silent reading in my fifth grade class and my students LOVE silent reading time. Most of them can't get enough of the books they're reading and can't wait to talk about them. But there's always the few who spend the entire silent reading time in the school library or at my personal library or trying to sneak away to the bathroom. They spend more time fidgeting than they do reading. How do you get those children to read? Well, one thing I have found that works is to put an Andrew Clements book in their hands.
Clements' books are simple and readable and according to most of my fifth graders, cool. Frindle, The Landry News, and Lunch Money are not filled with elementary student cliches. The characters aren't cheesy and my students don't find themselves saying "Come on, we're not like that" as is the case with many other books written for them. Clements' characters act and talk like real elementary students and are usually faced with real problems and this is an important part of his appeal. Room One is no exception.
One day while sixth grader Ted Hammond is delivering papers, he notices a mysterious face in an upstairs window of an old home, the Anderson's home. What spikes Ted's curiosity is that no one has lived in the Anderson house for two years. The house has sat empty and the windows have been boarded up. With nothing else going on in his small rural Nebraska town of Plattsford, Ted sets out to investigate.
I liked this book. I really did. It doesn't matter that I picked it up half-wanting, half-expecting a good mystery and didn't get one. Clements made me care about Ted, and April, and her family, and Mrs. Mitchell to the point where it didn't matter if the "mystery" to this story was solved for the reader less than halfway through the book. It's still a good story, and in the end, that's what children really want to read.
A few things I thoroughly enjoyed about the book . . . The Red Prairie Learning Center was fascinating to read about. The idea of a town, so against consolidating with surrounding communities that they've forced themselves to become what they have (a one room school with four 4th graders, one 6th grader, and four 8th graders) was an extremely interesting setting. I loved Mrs. Mitchell's character. She has many wonderful traits that only a teacher would be able to recognize. It didn't surprise me one bit to discover that Clements himself was a teacher at one point in time. No stereotypes here.
As long as you don't set your expectations too high, you'll find Room One a quick, easy, and entertaining read. The epilogue fills in the rest of the story nicely and provides adequate closure to the story surrounding April and her family. Having read most of Clements' other stories, seeing "A Mystery or Two" across this cover excited me some at the thought of a departure from his normal work, but please don't make the same mistake. This isn't so much a mystery as it is another fun (but somewhat serious), school story from Andrew Clements. And that's just fine by me.
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