Katy's Reviews > Pepper's Rules for Secret Sleuthing

The strengths of this middle grade novel are that it frankly (but age-appropriately) discusses topics like gender identity and beginning to understand sexual orientation, and also discussing topics like grief of losing a parent either to death or divorce/abandonment. So, as you can tell, there are a lot of heavy topics in this book... and what didn't work for me is that it felt like the heavy topics were wrapped in a sugary coating of a murder mystery (and the book is positioned/marketed as the latter). For me, the book would have worked better as a contemporary novel exploring these kids figuring all these things out, rather than a half-baked, plot-driven mystery with long interludes of heavy (and heavy-handed) exposition.