This book report is made by Carlyle Warner, the date is 9/22/2022.
City Spies is a book made by James Ponti. The book’s genre is Mystery, the publisher is Scholastic, it’s copyright year is 2020, and the number of pages is 367.
The author of City Spies, James Ponti is a New York Times bestselling author. He has helped produce shows for many channels such as, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and many more! He won the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile in 2018, which is an award for the best mystery book of the year.
City Spies is about a hacker that becomes a spy. It starts off with a girl named Sara who’s going to a court for hacking into the foster care system that she’s in, but a fake lawyer shows up, and tells the judge that Sara should spend years in a prison-like place. After the court session, the lawyer asks her if she wants to be a spy, and he gave her those years in prison to go to a fake place he made up, so she can basically go to spy camp, and become a spy. When Sara had accepted to be a spy, she wanted to get her belongings. So they went to her last foster care house, and tricked the foster parents into thinking there was money on the roof. They then snuck into the house and got Sara’s belongings.
After Sara left her foster home, she went a long way to Scotland, and met the four other spies that she’ll work with, named Paris, Rio, Kat, and Sydney, they’re called after the city they were recruited in. They were planning to compete in a competition, which one of their old members were in already, but that member had left the spy program to try to win one million Euros in the competition, and the spies are trying to stop them from winning, since their cover could be blown if that person and their team win. The spys also had to protect the host of the competition, since the owners of the companies representing the past competitions had been killed by someone, that even the police can’t find at all.
The character Rio is one of the spys, and is a magician, he uses his magic skills on missions, he wants to be the alpha of their missions a lot. Sara is another spy, which is good at hacking, at one point she was determined to climb a wall, which was hard to climb. Sydney is another spy, and is good in field missions, such as disabling a countdown timer. She likes using explosives in missions. Paris is another spy, and is good at survival skills, he uses them in missions. Kat is the final spy, and is good at cryptography, she also uses her cryptography skills in missions. Mother is their recruiter, and organizes their missions, he also helps them during the missions sometimes.
One thing said, in the book, which I happen to agree with is, “You cannot achieve what you cannot believe.” (p. 236) In my understanding, it is saying that you have to believe you can do something to be able to do it.
My favorite part would be the first part of chapter 17, where some people are shooting a movie and this one person kept forgetting his line, when it’s a very simple line. It could be improved by maybe having that part be longer, since it was funny. It was pretty short, but it was pretty funny.
I would recommend this book, since in my opinion it was really good. One reason why I liked this book is that mystery books can be fun a lot of times. I also like the spy aspect to the story. It is long though, it has about 37 chapters, some are short, and some are long.