★★★★☆ Spy School in Africa

Spy School Goes Wild

Stuart Gibbs

As I wrote previously, this is the Spy School formula

Spy School novels have a formula. We have Ben Ripley, a gifted kid who achieves excellent results by not being stupid, Ben's friends who are well-intentioned and sometimes competent, and the ever-expanding dysfunctional Hale family made up of the World's worst spies, who believe themselves to be the World's best spies, including toothsome teen sisters Erica and Trixie Hale. Gibbs picks a setting (frequently this is the site of a vacation or a sight-seeing visit he made), then makes up a silly James Bond-esque plot to play out there, with jokes! The main questions one asks on picking up a new Spy School book are "Where will it happen?" and "How will character relationships change?"

In the previous novel, Spy School Goes North, we picked up a new team member, Svetlana Shumovsky, whom Gibbs describes as "the Russian version of Erica", meaning that she's a super-competent child spy.

The setting of this particular installment, Spy School Goes Wild, is Africa, mostly Botswana. It is not based on one particular Gibbs family vacation -- rather, as Gibbs explains in his Acknowledgements, he has been on African safaris several times. Gibbs manages to strand Ben with his feckless nemesis Murray Hill in the African wilderness with elephants, impalas, and hippopotamuses and leave them to survive somehow. This section was a lot of fun. After that, as expected, Ben's support team (Svetlana included) finds him and they go on to foil an evil plot.

This is one of the better Spy School novels, in my opinion. If you like the rest, you'll enjoy this.

Spy School Goes Wild on Amazon

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