City Spies (City Spies #1)
James Ponti
Aladdin
Published March 10, 2020
Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads
About City Spies
Sara Martinez is a hacker. She recently broke into the New York City foster care system to expose her foster parents as cheats and lawbreakers. However, instead of being hailed as a hero, Sara finds herself facing years in a juvenile detention facility and banned from using computers for the same stretch of time. Enter Mother, a British spy who not only gets Sara released from jail but also offers her a chance to make a home for herself within a secret MI6 agency.
Operating out of a base in Scotland, the City Spies are five kids from various parts of the world. When they’re not attending the local boarding school, they’re honing their unique skills, such as sleight of hand, breaking and entering, observation, and explosives. All of these allow them to go places in the world of espionage where adults can’t.
Before she knows what she’s doing, Sarah is heading to Paris for an international youth summit, hacking into a rival school’s computer to prevent them from winning a million euros, dangling thirty feet off the side of a building, and trying to stop a villain…all while navigating the complex dynamics of her new team.
No one said saving the world was easy…
My Review
I’m waaay behind on the City Spies series, but I keep hearing people talk about it, so I wanted to give it a try. I have books five and six on my shelf, so I would love to catch up enough to read them.
The first novel that I read by James Ponti is The Sherlock Society, which I had a ton of fun reading. The tone of that one is different than City Spies, which makes sense, since one is a mystery and the other is a spy thriller. I think personally, I prefer the more low-key, Florida-based mystery vibe in The Sherlock Society, but I still found a lot to like about City Spies.
City Spies rotates through several points of view. It starts out with Sarah’s perspective and then introduces Paris’s point-of-view and that of the mentor they call “Mother.” We also see some scenes from the perspective of a girl no longer on the City Spies team. This allows us to get some backstory on how the team formed and what’s truly at stake. It also created a really nice setup for a sweet moment between Sarah and Mother at the end.
The book perfectly set up the series. It leaves tons of room for future adventures for the team who operate under the names of the cities they were recruited from. I love that little snippet of geography and the fact that future books take the team to different places. I’m interested to read more.
Content Notes
Recommended for Ages 8 to 12.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.
Romance/Sexual Content
None.
Spiritual Content
None.
Violent Content
Situations of peril. Someone threatens others with a biological weapon.
Drug Content
None.
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