Rage in the Page: If this exists, my children are so going there

Saturday, November 15, 2008

If this exists, my children are so going there

Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy
by Ally Carter

We rejoin Cammie and the rest of the Gallagher girls during her sophomore year of high school at the Gallagher Academy, a super-secret private school that teaches the students how to be spies (to the point where there's a designated language/dialect for each meal, and they're regularly kidnapped by teachers for class exercises).

Cammie's still recovering from her freshman year, where she had a forbidden relationship with a boy in town (just hand-holding and a kiss, you perverts) - the locals just think it's a snooty girls school, and for security reasons they prefer to keep things that way, so no outside relationships.

Following an exercise where the girls have to shake a tail and meet at a rendezvous point, they receive news that BOYS are COMING TO GALLAGHER. This is blasphemy. There are some male teachers, but it's been girls-only since its founding 100+ years ago. Plus Cammie's still trying to figure out what really happened when her father was killed during a mission several years ago; her mom, who also happens to be headmaster, and one of her teachers, know more than they're letting on.

So Cammie and her 3 friends (the nerd, the bombshell, and the rebel, of course) set out to find out what the boys are really doing at their school. As you may expect, this involves planting bugs and tracking devices in the boys' dormitory. Come on, they're spies, after all. And during all this the cutest of the boys has definitely taken an interest in Cammie, which she finds suspicious because her greatest talent is being essentially invisible (great for a spy, not so great for finding a boyfriend).

By the end of the book, very few of Cammie's questions have been answered, except that the boys are NOT up to no good. The powers-that-be decided that the girls should learn how to interact with boys/men before they're thrown out into the real spying world, so they imported some from the semi-rival equivalent boys' spy school. But to get to this point, there was another awesome kidnapping and chase sequence where the girls had to trust the boys and accept their help in order to recover potentially sensitive information revealing the names of all former students (aka a list of current spies).

Apparently the first book has been optioned for a movie by Disney. If they screw this up, heads will roll, even if I don't have the training to accomplish that.

I WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL HERE.

Labels: action, friendship, girl power, hunky armed forces or government operatives, martial arts, romance of the non-trashy variety, young adult, young protagonists