City Spies: A Good Start to a Series


City Spies is a book I read a few years ago and recently decided to reread. It's the first book in the six-book City Spies series. I stopped after the first two when I read it before, so this time I’ll probably read them all if they don't get progressively worse as many series often do.


The main character is Sara Martinez, an 12 year old orphan who’s a hacker and recently hacked into a foster care system and a bank to try to expose her foster parents for treating their foster kids badly and only taking them in to get paid. Unfortunately, she’s the one arrested. However, when she’s about to have her trial, a fake lawyer shows up and manages to get her out of trouble. Sara’s confused why he did it until she finds out she’s being recruited to join a group of kids with special talents working for MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service. 


Sara accepts, and starts going by the name Brooklyn, as the kids take the name of their city and she’s from Brooklyn, New York. Spy life isn’t as fancy and sleek as she expected, but she’s soon part of a mission to try to protect a rich owner of a technology corporation who MI6 thinks may be a target of Umbra, their main rival organization. 


I thought this book was really well plotted. I think when I read it before I didn’t understand some parts, but this time I was able to appreciate all the twists and how everything seemed to come together. There were some incomplete parts that made it clear it was part of a series, but I think it could easily be read as a stand-alone book.


I also liked how the locations and events going on switched back and forth between chapters. While Brooklyn was transitioning into her new home, there were chapters that went back and explained the backstories of the other kids, which was entertaining and helped me as a reader get to know them better. 


There were a few things I didn’t like about this book though. The first one is the comedy. There were some little jokes that might have made slightly younger kids laugh but I just thought they were kind of stupid. Also, Brooklyn is pretty proud about her hacking skills which annoyed me. Yes, she’s a really good hacker, but multiple times she convinced the other kids that she was better at hacking than the girl she had been recruited to replace (Charlotte). 


But overall, I think this was an entertaining, worthwhile book with a well-thought out plot and I recommend it.


-Janny

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeper of the Lost Cities: The Frustrating but Mildly Entertaining Elf Book Series

Image
                   Sometime somewhat recently I decided that there’s a point in your life where you have to stop reading Harry Potter on repeat and start something else. It gets a little bit predictable after your 8th time…  Anyway, my cousin’s friend told my cousin to read Keeper of the Lost Cities, and then my cousin started it and liked it and told me to read it. So I did. And it was okay I guess. What is it about?   Keeper of the Lost Cities is a middle grade fantasy series about a girl named Sophie who is a senior in high school as a 12 year old and lives a normal life (other than being a senior in high school as a 12 year old). Oh, and also, she is a telepath and can read people’s minds. And she’s never told anyone that.  During a school field trip to a museum one day, a boy named Fitz shows up and tells her she’s an elf, takes her to this whole other world (not really, the locations where the elves liv...
Read more

The Naturals By Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Image
If you’ve read The Inheritance Games, you know that the book is written by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. After reading the series I found out that The Naturals was written by the same author, so I decided to read the book.     The Naturals is about a teenage girl named Cassie Hobbes. Cassie is a profiler, meaning that she can predict human behaviors, lifestyles, and background information just by looking at a person. Cassie has never told anyone that she is a profiler but one day, she gets recruited by the FBI to a group called the Naturals. To join the program, Cassie moves from her grandma’s house to Natural’s house. The group has 4 other teenagers that have other natural talents including lie detecting, reading emotions, talent with numbers (statistician), and another profiler just like Cassie. At the program, each teenager learns how to use their talents for solving murders. For example, Cassie learns how to predict a human’s lifestyle by looking at a crime scene. As the st...
Read more

Last Book of Summer: Love & Luck by Jenna Evans Welch

Image
   Last Book of Summer: Love & Luck by Jenna Evans Welch I recently read a book called Love & Luck by Jenna Evans Welch to end the summer. Since this book has a summer feel, I decided to read it right before fall officially started on September 22. Jenna Welch has written two other books similar to Love & Luck called Love & Gelato and Love & Olives which I thought were way better than Love & Luck . Love & Luck  is about a girl named Addie and her trip to Ireland for her aunt’s wedding in the summer. Addie has three older brothers but is especially close to Ian, the youngest brother. Addie and Ian are best friends to each other but over the past few months, they have started to grow apart due to a secret that Addie kept from him. After their aunt’s wedding, Addie had planned to fly to Italy to meet her friend Lina but Addie and Ian got into a huge fight at the wedding. Their mom says that they both have to go on the trip but they need to resol...
Read more