Compare+and+Contrast+Piece--Mystery+Genre+Study

There are many similarities and differences between the two mystery picture books, "The Mystery at Club Sandwich", and Grandpa's Teeth". LAME!
Both books have many elements common to the mystery genre. For example, they both have a crime or a problem to be solved. Both stories have detectives, suspects, clues, distracting clues, and resolutions; but in my opinion, the author of one of these books does a far more effective job at weaving these elements together to keep the reader interested throughout the story.

Grandpa's Teeth and The Mystery at Club Sandwich are both built around a crime. In one, Grandpa's dentures are missing, and in the other one, somebody has stolen a character's lucky marbles. The mystery in both is to find out who the culprit is, and in both stories there are multiple suspects. However, the way the suspects are portrayed in the two different books are dramatically different. In Grandpa's Teeth, the author paints the suspects in a humorous way, one that clearly isn't intended to be taken seriously by the reader. Meanwhile, in the Mystery at Club Sandwich, there are circumstances around each suspect that make the reader actually question whether or not each one could be the culprit. Because I enjoyed the process of "solving" the crime along with the characters, I felt that Club Sandwich had more interesting suspects.

The main element that makes these characters so suspicious in the Mystery at Club Sandwich is the clues. Both books contain clues the detectives use to solve the crime, but the authors use them in different ways for the reader. In Grandpa's Teeth, there really weren't many clues, and what clues there were are found mainly in the illustrations. There were a few clues mentioned by the author in writing, like the fact that anyone who didn't smile was a suspect, but they really needed to be put together with the illustrations (the dog never smiled, and was the culprit). Other clues mentioned were silly and distracting. In Club Sandwich, there were also two types of clues, though they were different from those in Granpa's Teeth. Some of the clues were found by the detective, like the peanut butter and the ostrich feathers found with all of the suspects. But other clues, the detective missed, but we found them. An example of this was the fact that the culprit's last name was Trouble. Also, the use of the word, "sparkly" to describe the rocks in the fish tank (which were the marbles!).

==In both of these picture books, there were clues the reader could use to solve the mystery. However the authors used these clues in very different ways. For instance, in the Mystery at Club Sandwich, the author made the clues clear to the reader, because the detective found them all. When we put the clues together, we still had to work to solve the mystery. On the other hand, in Grandpa's Teeth, the clues weren't clear to us, and in fact were only in the illustrations. The detectives in that story never even saw the clues AND never solved the crime!==

As you can see, the two books, __The Mystery at Club Sandwich__ and __Grandpa's Teeth,__ have similarities and differences. They both have clues, detectives, and problems, but the way the authors handled those elements were different in both books. In my opinion, the Mystery at Club Sandwich was more fun to read. The author expertly crafted the clues, characters, and problems to make the mystery interesting and fun to solve. However, if you like reading mysteries, try reading both of them and see which one you like the best!