Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsGibbs flips the game board
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 6, 2022
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?" At the end of the previous novel (Spy School at Sea) Erica and Ben became boyfriend and girlfriend, so we were expecting to see that play out in book 10. (And of course I'm not going to tell you what happens with that.)
To me, however, the big question was what would happen to the formula. It seemed to be getting a bit tired. Book 8, Spy School Revolution felt decidedly "Meh..." to me. Spy School at Sea recaptured a little of the magic, but still was not as funny as the first book. Now, there was no pressing need to change the formula. Spy School has an army of devoted followers (I am one -- I have read every one of the books) and new releases regularly rack up 4.8-star average ratings on Amazon. Why not continue to give the readers what they so evidently want? Why not milk this cow?
Well, score one for artistic integrity! Apparently Gibbs realized he was getting into a rut and took action to boost himself out of it. He doesn't say exactly this, but in an Author's Note at the end he writes
"... in the first nine Spy School books, the evil plots of the bad guys have all been riffs on the sort of ridiculous, over-the-top evil schemes of James Bond villains ... But when the time came to think about book ten, I realized that there were actual, real-world issues that would make for good plots as well."
So in chapter one he blows everything up (literally). The Spy School novels will never be the same again. (At least I hope not, because this is SO much better.) Now, to allay the fears of avid Spy School fans, I hasten to add that Project X is still a Spy School novel. It still stars Ben and his friends and the Hale family, along with comically inept nemesis Murray Hill.
The result is a novel that is simultaneously much more serious and much funnier than previous Spy School novels. It is more serious because of those real-world issues he alludes to, which, to avoid spoilers, I will not identify. It is funnier because the jokes are more frequent and better. I don't know why that is, but I speculate that Gibbs was enthusiastic about this new direction, and inspired to be funnier.
