The Tower on the Highest Hill

Seven children. Ninety-one steps. A building that is on no map.Everybody has been inside the tower. Nobody has ever looked at it.The story says a man built a tower on the highest hill in his land, and worked there one summer by the light of three candles, and found something. Or made something. Or, depending on which great-aunt tells it, both. The Athertons have been telling that story for two hundred years and not one of them has ever asked when.Beatrice asks. What she finds is that the man in the story spent forty-one years out on a flat roof in the rain, complaining of it, and never once wrote the word dome. So the building on the hill is not his tower. And there is nothing else on that hill at all.Between May and midsummer, seven children take a hundred foot cord and a curtain weight up a hill and discover that the outside of a building is bigger than the inside. They open a doorway that somebody bricked up after taking its door off its hinges. They find a bought title filed at the bottom of a box under the coal bills, a man who sold sixty-one men and two furnaces to buy a word he could not say out loud, and four lines in a weather book, written between a note about a flue and a note about a gate, that decided which of four children had failed.And at the top of ninety-one steps there is a room fourteen feet square, with a stool lying on its side, and a shallow copper dish that nobody alive can explain.For readers of The Mysterious Benedict Society, Greenglass House, and Frances Hardinge. A quiet, literary middle grade mystery with no villain in it, about who a place belongs to, what a written record does to people who cannot answer it back, and what seven children decide to do when they find out they could make another one.Best for confident readers of ten and up, and for the adults who end up reading it over their shoulder.Book 3 of The Atherton Manor Mysteries, and the end of the trilogy. It follows the same seven children from The Starlight Secret Society and The Music of the Spheres. Start with Book 1.