Category: Books

The great thing about a franchise is that it’s dependable. City Spies by New York Times Bestselling author James Ponti is one of the go-to mglit book series for upper-elementary through middle school readers who know. The first four books, and about half of Mission Manhattan, read like a screenplay that is primed and ready to become the next movie franchise that you didn’t know you needed. They’re loaded with enough action, teen-centric humor, and intrigue to keep ages 8-12 entertained and invested in the group’s progress. The group goes on supervised missions where adult spies would look too out of place and each spy is named after the mega city from which they’re from, like Rio, London, Cairo, etc. City Spies: Mission Manhattan finds the group of teenage spies-in-training in Italy and New York embroiled in a plot to save a fellow teenager from danger within her camp.

I’m wary of a potentially smaltzy book that my wife abandons. When we received Juniper’s Christmas by Eoin Colfer my wife read it for two nights and then put it aside, and not because she’s finished it. Normally she’s a sucker for any novel that exudes happiness or romantic retribution, and this book looks like it fits that bill, so I asked her what was up. She said something along the lines of “I just wasn’t feeling it”, and anybody knows that when your wife gives you a short answer like that to a potentially long question, you’re thankful and just move on. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I have COVID, or the flu, or some otherwise cursed virus that makes your body feel as if it’s been hit by a truck driven by a teenager who is busy watching TikTok, instead of commanding the three-ton vehicle that’s about to hit your torso. Juniper’s Christmas is delivered to the basement where I was thankful to read anything beyond the packaging for the cold medicine that I was taking, and lo and behold, what a surprising novel that is ready for its cinematic close-up.

The adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” exists for a reason. Outside Nowhere is another book that exemplifies why it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Now that I’ve got two potentially outdated metaphors out of my system, let’s get on with the process of talking about a book that grades six and up will love, if they give it a chance. The book’s cover throws up a potential roadblock to mglit readers in that it shows a teenage kid, wearing a suit, with his back to the reader, looking at a farm. Every young reader knows that nothing fun ever happens on a farm so what’s the point in reading Outside Nowhere anyway? But gird your loins mglit readers, hold on because once you dig into Outside Nowhere you’ll discover a novel that brims with comedy, has snappy dialogue with jokes and one-liners that you wish you could say in real time, and a surprising science-fiction twist that reveals the heart of the book.