Skip to main content

Mrs. Smith's Spy School for Girls


Mrs. Smith's Spy School for Girls
by Beth McMullen
Aladdin, 2017. Fiction. 295 p.
Abby Hunter is not happy when her mother tells her that she will soon be going to a boarding school.  Once there, however, she makes friends who share her love of sneaking around and trying to solve mysteries. One day as she is eves dropping on the head mistress of the school, Mrs. Smith, she discovers that Mrs. Smith is running a spy school within the boarding school, and that she recruits prospective spies from the boarding school student body.  Abby is recruited and finds herself on her first mission, but can she be sure who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys?

Spy school books are a real trend right now and this one does not disappoint. In some spy books, the child comes with a full set of special spy skills, but that is not the case here.  On her very first stakeout, Abby gets so scared she passes out cold! It is Abby's imperfections that will endear her to young readers and in the end she gains enough courage and skill to be successful. This was a fun read and almost certainly the beginning of a promising series.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...

Review: Fowl Play

  Fowl Play By Kristin O'Donnell Tubb New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2024. Fiction 277 pages. Still reeling from her beloved uncle's death, Chloe Alvarez is comforted and confused when at his last will and testament reading, Uncle Will gifts her his African Grey parrot, Charlie. Charlie has a robust vocabulary and loves to make Alexa requests for her favorite songs, but when she starts saying things like, "homicide," and "cyanide," Chloe becomes convinced that Uncle Will may have met his demise by murder instead of a genetic disease, as was previously thought. Ultimately, bringing in her brother, Grammy, and Uncle Frank (and of course Charlie,) Chloe's ragtag and adoring family support her search for answers ---going on stakeouts, engaging in fast pursuits, and searching for clues. But as the suspects stack up and the mystery grows, Chole will learn that the process of death and grieving is complicated, and in the end her Uncle Will's words that, ...

Five Faves: Picture Books About Wolves

There are a lot of great picture books that have wolves in them. Wolves are beautiful, strong creatures that can also represent scary things (like in the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood). Here are five great new-ish picture books that feature wolves, for those kids who love to howl at the moon.  Full Moon Pups  Written by Liz Garton Scanlon  Illustrated by Chuck Groenink  New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2023. Picture Book. This is a beautifully illustrated story about a pack of new wolf pups and how they grow over the course of one moon’s cycle, from full moon to new moon and back again. Readers will see how the new pups don’t open their eyes for days, how they start to explore the world around them, and how the older members of the pack take care of them. The book also includes information about the phases of the moon at the end.  Little Good Wolf  By Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel  Boston: Clarion Books, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publi...