REVIEW: I'd Tell You...
I had a good book shopping expedition yesterday, and after a few wasted expeditions, I needed one. Two girls own books and one annual (with a contribution by Josephine Elder), a few murder mysteries and the next book in a series I'm reading that I'd have been happy to pay full price for, but didn't have to, because charity shops can be wonderful.
I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have To Kill You: Ally Carter Orchard Books 2009
The first in the Gallagher Girls series has definitely left me wanting to read more. Cleverly, the promotional blurb in the opening pages doesn’t quote other writers, but girls from the target audience. And what girl wouldn’t love to read a story about a boarding school for girls who are training to be spies? I would have, and though I’m not a girl any more, I enjoyed this.
Our heroine is Cammie ‘The Chameleon’ Morgan, fifteen years old and facing her sophomore year, where she and her classmates, who include longstanding friends Bex aka The Duchess (because she’s English) and Liz aka The Bookworm, will be going down to the first secret level below the school for covert ops training for the first time. Their school’s curriculum is...different. Cammie is a good guide to the school’s history (named after Gillian Gallagher, the brave girl who saved Abraham Lincoln from the first assassination attempt that history didn’t see fit to record) and knows many of the building’s secrets, because her mother is the headmistress. That’s her beautiful overachieving ex(?) spy mother. Her father is dead, although a body has never been found.
There are other new things happening this school year: first, there’s a new covert ops teacher, who has movie star looks and the devotion of the student body until he starts teaching them - one of the lessons is to go through people’s rubbish and learn what they can from it. (Americans don’t recycle?) And the trio of BFF - who have worked out a balance of temperaments - Bex likes violence, Liz anything she can study for, while Cammie earned her nickname by her ability to blur into the background, which makes her believe no-one can see her - have to give up the extra space in their dorm and share it with a newcomer. Marcie is the kind of girl who would go to the sort of school the Gallagher Academy pretends to be, her mother is a cosmetics heiress, her father a Senator and their progeny is the bitch she labels other people as being. She’s also going to have to learn a lot academically as most of the students are geniuses doing PhD-level chemistry, capable of physical feats of all kinds, and the rotation of languages they are supposed to converse in at mealtimes would make even a Chalet Girl blanch (English and French, yes, but Japanese, Portuguese, Swahili and Farsi?)
And then Cammie, who is so immersed in the world of spying, is noticed by a local boy, a nice, regular teenage boy named Josh - well, his parents are so white picket fence that I was suspicious that it was a cover. Suddenly all her spy skills and Marcie’s outside world expertise come in handy in decoding boy speak. Only, of course, as a Gallagher girl, Cammie has many more ways of delving into his mind and life than your average girl - cue invasions of privacy, epic sneaking off and a ridiculous legend. When the lies pile up and, inevitably, her cover is blown, Cammie has to make a choice - epitomised in a form to signify that she wants to continue to study covert operations and prepare to go out in the field.
It’s a fun read and unlike what I suspect would happen if this had been written by Meg Cabot, there’s little frustration that the author isn’t making the most of a cool premise. The throwaway asides are priceless - don’t believe what Men in Black told you, Gallagher Girls came up with most of the brilliant and useful inventions of the past century or so (or maybe their staff). Despite that, it’s essentially a story about friendship, family and first love and the choices that a teenage girl makes, just in much more extreme circumstances. The spy element is the refreshing aspect - four seems to be the de facto number of girls in a dorm in a modern boarding school story for girls! I’ll be interested in how the series develops - for example, I’d have thought there was an equivalent boys’ school and what about schools in other countries? Is Cammie’s father truly dead, and if so, will her mother start dating Joe Solomon?
One thing that I did find strange was the fact that it seemed as if the book had been deamericanised by the British publishers - we get the spelling ‘honour’ and talk of ‘rubbish’ - but then, while some of the slang that Bex uses is British and there’s a lot of emphasis on her driving on the wrong side of the road when the girls start having lessons, her English father’s name is Abe (unless if they’re Jewish, which isn’t mentioned, that strikes me as such an American diminutive and name) But it’s fun and by making these girls smart and skilled and continually emphasising that they are stronger together, even while gently poking understanding fun at the panic and madness involved in being a teenage girl, it’s probably a marvellous read for the target audience.
This entry was originally posted at http://www.dreamwidth.org/12345.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.
I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have To Kill You: Ally Carter Orchard Books 2009
The first in the Gallagher Girls series has definitely left me wanting to read more. Cleverly, the promotional blurb in the opening pages doesn’t quote other writers, but girls from the target audience. And what girl wouldn’t love to read a story about a boarding school for girls who are training to be spies? I would have, and though I’m not a girl any more, I enjoyed this.
Our heroine is Cammie ‘The Chameleon’ Morgan, fifteen years old and facing her sophomore year, where she and her classmates, who include longstanding friends Bex aka The Duchess (because she’s English) and Liz aka The Bookworm, will be going down to the first secret level below the school for covert ops training for the first time. Their school’s curriculum is...different. Cammie is a good guide to the school’s history (named after Gillian Gallagher, the brave girl who saved Abraham Lincoln from the first assassination attempt that history didn’t see fit to record) and knows many of the building’s secrets, because her mother is the headmistress. That’s her beautiful overachieving ex(?) spy mother. Her father is dead, although a body has never been found.
There are other new things happening this school year: first, there’s a new covert ops teacher, who has movie star looks and the devotion of the student body until he starts teaching them - one of the lessons is to go through people’s rubbish and learn what they can from it. (Americans don’t recycle?) And the trio of BFF - who have worked out a balance of temperaments - Bex likes violence, Liz anything she can study for, while Cammie earned her nickname by her ability to blur into the background, which makes her believe no-one can see her - have to give up the extra space in their dorm and share it with a newcomer. Marcie is the kind of girl who would go to the sort of school the Gallagher Academy pretends to be, her mother is a cosmetics heiress, her father a Senator and their progeny is the bitch she labels other people as being. She’s also going to have to learn a lot academically as most of the students are geniuses doing PhD-level chemistry, capable of physical feats of all kinds, and the rotation of languages they are supposed to converse in at mealtimes would make even a Chalet Girl blanch (English and French, yes, but Japanese, Portuguese, Swahili and Farsi?)
And then Cammie, who is so immersed in the world of spying, is noticed by a local boy, a nice, regular teenage boy named Josh - well, his parents are so white picket fence that I was suspicious that it was a cover. Suddenly all her spy skills and Marcie’s outside world expertise come in handy in decoding boy speak. Only, of course, as a Gallagher girl, Cammie has many more ways of delving into his mind and life than your average girl - cue invasions of privacy, epic sneaking off and a ridiculous legend. When the lies pile up and, inevitably, her cover is blown, Cammie has to make a choice - epitomised in a form to signify that she wants to continue to study covert operations and prepare to go out in the field.
It’s a fun read and unlike what I suspect would happen if this had been written by Meg Cabot, there’s little frustration that the author isn’t making the most of a cool premise. The throwaway asides are priceless - don’t believe what Men in Black told you, Gallagher Girls came up with most of the brilliant and useful inventions of the past century or so (or maybe their staff). Despite that, it’s essentially a story about friendship, family and first love and the choices that a teenage girl makes, just in much more extreme circumstances. The spy element is the refreshing aspect - four seems to be the de facto number of girls in a dorm in a modern boarding school story for girls! I’ll be interested in how the series develops - for example, I’d have thought there was an equivalent boys’ school and what about schools in other countries? Is Cammie’s father truly dead, and if so, will her mother start dating Joe Solomon?
One thing that I did find strange was the fact that it seemed as if the book had been deamericanised by the British publishers - we get the spelling ‘honour’ and talk of ‘rubbish’ - but then, while some of the slang that Bex uses is British and there’s a lot of emphasis on her driving on the wrong side of the road when the girls start having lessons, her English father’s name is Abe (unless if they’re Jewish, which isn’t mentioned, that strikes me as such an American diminutive and name) But it’s fun and by making these girls smart and skilled and continually emphasising that they are stronger together, even while gently poking understanding fun at the panic and madness involved in being a teenage girl, it’s probably a marvellous read for the target audience.
This entry was originally posted at http://www.dreamwidth.org/12345.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.