Reading Wednesday

[troisoiseaux]

Continued my nostalgic re-reads of 2000s middle-grade/YA novels with I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have To Kill You by Ally Carter, the first book in the Gallagher Girls series, set at an all-girls boarding school for TEEN SPIES. As you can imagine, this was my jam in middle school; however, my primary emotion on re-reading this book as an adult was second-hand embarrassment, since main character Cammie (a superspy nepo baby, whose mom is the headmistress of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women and whose dad died tragically on a top-secret mission) mostly puts the lessons learned in her Covert Operations class - that one man's trash is another's treasure trove of the first guy's secrets, how to build and maintain a cover story, etc. - to practical, if ill-advised, use by... stalking some cute normie boy and then sneaking out to go on dates with him. (I know, I know, this is a YA novel, but COMPLETE waste of an elite spy education, if you ask me.) The climactic sequence where Cammie and friends take their CoveOps practical final - a late-night heist, of course - was fun, though.

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[troisoiseaux]

I read the first... three, I think? And remembered them fondly, if vaguely. (The e-book I just read had an epilogue - a tie-in to the second book - that I swear was not in the copy I'd had back then?) But, alas, not everything I enjoyed in 2006 holds up to re-reading, I guess.