Oxford Blood

Gr 8 Up–Seventeen-year-old, working-class, biracial teen Eva has wanted to study English at Oxford University her whole life. She and her best friend/boyfriend, George, both make it to interview week as state school students, and she is excited to spend the week at Beecham College and meet Professor Bernard, who does groundbreaking work on campus diversity programs. When Eva finds George’s body at the foot of the controversial statue of founder Sir H.C. Glanville that sits on the campus quad, her dreams turn into a nightmare. The police write off George’s death as an accident, but Eva believes it is murder and she is determined to solve it. As she digs deeper into George’s death, she uncovers secrets about him and Oxford that powerful people would rather remain buried. With the help of some of the other interviewees and her detective father, Eva unravels the mysteries of the school she longs to attend. The book explores issues of race, power, class, equity, and colonialism in a way that deftly connects a focus on social justice to a suspenseful plot twist in this well-paced mystery.