Spy School, by Stuart Gibbs

In the movies, when spies fight, they always look very cool, using a combination of martial arts and cleverly improvised weapons, often in an incredibly picturesque location, like a castle in the French Alps.

This fight wasn’t anything like that.

One January afternoon, twelve-year-old Ben Ripley, middle school math whiz, comes home to find a strange, tuxedo-clad man in his living room. He’s Alexander Hale, CIA agent and super spy, and he’s there to whisk Ben away to a secret school in Washington, D.C.—so secret that Ben didn’t even realize that he was in the running to go there—for young CIA recruits.

Once he gets there, it doesn’t take long for him to realize: Spy School is waaaaay less fun—and far more dangerous—than regular middle school. (And Ben isn’t remotely a fan of regular middle school either, so it’s a pretty low bar.)

As if getting attacked by his own classmates and having to suffer through mind-numbingly boring lectures on a daily basis isn’t enough, his amazing cryptography skills have made him the prime target of a shadowy criminal organization.

Except someone somewhere made a big, big mistake… because Ben DOESN’T HAVE amazing cryptography skills.

So, my tween book club kids are obsessed with this series AND this author in general. And I’ve been promising to read it for months now, so here I am, having read it.

DO NOT TELL MY KIDS, but… I kind of… hated it?

My plan, if asked, is to say something along the lines of, “Holy cow, friends, I *totally* see why you all like this series so much!!” and then get them to just chatter about it some more. Because that way I won’t be lying OR discouraging them OR making them feel like I’m bagging on their reading tastes.

Because I totally DO see why they like it so much, and there absolutely were things I liked about it! I’m always a fan of boarding school books! I’m always a fan of kid characters with world-weary voices! I’m always a fan of funny genre stories! I love secret world within the regular world stories, and I love secret tunnels!

But this book, in a nutshell, is The Rise of a Mediocre White Guy: The Middle Grade Novel.

Spoiler: He’s not really Spy School Material—he’s been brought in as bait to smoke out a mole on campus.

And yet, somehow, even though he spends the majority of the book waiting for things to happen to him, he saves the day—AND THE OLDER GIRL WHO IS ONE BILLION-ZILLION TIMES MORE COMPETENT THAN HIM—multiple times. Obviously, I understand that that’s so that the reader can better identify with him. I know that, I really do. But it’s just such a tiresome dynamic.

The female characters—even a computer voice!!—are almost ALL introduced in terms of their attractiveness, and the one exception to that rule immediately has googly-eyes for him. We are treated to people dismissing things in gendered terms (“gabbing like girls”, etc.) with no pushback at all, so even when it’s coming from a Jerk Character, it’s normalizing that behavior. I understand that A) this book is going on ten years old, and B) it’s riffing on a genre that’s steeped in obnoxious machismo and sexism, but because it doesn’t do much* to subvert it, it’s just… boring??

Oh, also bonus White Default—the only time I caught a character’s skin tone mentioned, it was a very attractive older girl with skin the color of “hot chocolate.”

I’m going to work on a readalikes list—once again, for my book club kids—so, fingers crossed that I find something along similar lines that’s a better fit for me, too?

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*Spoiler: Super-spy Alexander Hale turns out to be one of those dudes who is terrible at his job AND takes credit for everyone else’s work, but… eh. An argument could be made that this book is way better than my impressions of it are, buuuuut as a reader in 2020, I still don’t think it’s aged particularly well.

Other books from 2012