"City Spies: London Calling" by James Ponti

This one's better than the last one, I'll give it that.

Its plotting is a tad weird. For most of the book there's essentially two plots, one about someone trying to screw with the upcoming royal wedding of fictional people (feat. Kat, Sydney, Brooklyn, and Monty the adult) and one about finding the missing sibling of one of the City Spies (feat. Paris, Rio, Cairo, and Mother the adult). They do eventually mesh together toward the end.

This volume also introduces one of the classics of spy fiction: the mole hunt.

My main beef with the narrative here is their supercomputer, Beny, |developing into a cloud-based machine intelligence and returning from the dead (well, destroyed)... somehow. (I use "machine intelligence" to refer to things like GLaDOS from Portal, Jane from Ender's Game, and Jarvis from Marvel--basically, sentient computers that used to be called "artificial intelligence" before generative AI came along and ruined that term.) That was the main shark this story jumped, as the series is otherwise pretty realistic, but we don't have truly sentient computers yet.|

Other than that, it's mostly good. I liked the reveal that Clementine, Mother's estranged wife (don't worry, Mother is a guy; he picked the name as something of a joke, I think) |was actually going undercover to spy on the bad guys, not actually joining them|.

The series seems to be building toward a conclusion with this one. It also ends on a tiny bit of a cliffhanger (really more of a monkey-bars-hanger; nobody's actually in danger, but the book isn't wrapped up yet). I think we have at most three more books to go. (I may also be dramatically wrong.)

My secondary beef with the narrative is the fact that unlike the last few, we don't have a strong sense of purpose in this one, possibly as a consequence of the divorced plotlines.

Katherine Kathmandu "Kat" NoLastCodename continues to be my favorite character. My brain still insists her full name is Katherine.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fight scenes.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Despite the title, London [neither the city itself or a new City Spy named London] never calls anyone on the phone.)

"City Spies: Mission Manhattan" by James Ponti

This one is both good and lame at the same time. On the one hand, it involves climate change activism, which... c'mon. Nobody you're complaining at is actually causing the problem anymore. On the other hand, the team does get a chance to shine on their own for once, as their handlers are all unable to do any handling. 

And they do acquit themselves well. There's a fairly significant time gap between when I read this and when I'm reviewing it, so I don't remember what all they did, but most of it was cool. (The rest was mostly dogfish-jumping, which is like shark-jumping but less egregious; it's the only slightly unbelievable things.)

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, probably, just because that's what I gave all the other ones.

3 stars. we did not need the climate change complaining.

Favorite lines:

    "Okay, I'm at a computer," he relayed to Brooklyn. "What do you want me to do? Hack the motherboard? Override the password?"

    "Those aren't even things," Brooklyn replied.

    Page 54.

    "You cracked the eggs." Rio turned to the others. "I think he did a good job, don't you?"

    "Oh yes. The eggs taste particularly well cracked," Kat said dryly.

    Page 68. An example of why Kat is my favorite character.

(Endnote: This is Book 5, not Book 0, so I can no longer say I've read the entire series in reverse order.)

"City Spies" by James Ponti

Yep, it's the first one of these. It provides backstory info on Brooklyn (everyone on this team has a tragic backstory of some sort, otherwise they'd have parents), as well as introducing Charlotte as more of a character than just her cameo in book 3.

Overall, I had the hardest time suspending my disbelief with this one. Its plot isn't any more outlandish than book 3's (which involved a bunch of stolen nuclear warheads), but this one just kind of rubbed me wrong.

I think part of the problem was the characterization of the character "Mother" was rather off compared to the rest of the books. ("Mother" is the man--yes, a man named "Mother", it's an in-universe long story that I've forgotten--who basically acts as the mission control for the team, as well as the adult to accompany the main characters whenever they have to go somewhere that unaccompanied children couldn't realistically go.) He seems to be making it up as he goes along in this one, as opposed to in the other three books where he acts with a lot more forethought. Actually, a bunch of the characterizations were off, most notably with Kat (but that might just be because I like her best).

All in all, I'm glad that this is the first book in the series, because that means the plotting and character portrayals and such get better as the series goes on. Book 5 is out now, as well, which means I'm going to have to get it from the library.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some mentions of child abuse (remember how I mentioned Brooklyn's tragic backstory?) and tense scenes.

Unlike the other three, this book gets 3 stars, for reasons I talked about above.

(Endnote: I've gotten fairly used to the fact that Paris is a guy, but I still can't make myself remember that Kat is short for Kathmandu, not Katherine.)

"City Spies: Golden Gate" by James Ponti

Behold, book 2 in this series (of which I have read books 3 and 4). Having already defeated... actually, I haven't read book 1 so I don't really know but the answer is probably "criminals," the City Spies must now face their most dangerous foe yet: teenage drama.

Yeah, this book makes me glad that Sydney and Brooklyn have gotten their friendship ironed out in the next books, because they spend a lot of their time angrily avoiding each other. And then making themselves get along when it's mission time, only to go right back to drama when the mission is over.

I really liked that this book had a short backstory scene about MI6 recruiting Kat, stuck right into the middle of the book (around page 256). She's my favorite character, which meant that I'm happier than I would have been had the backstory scene been about, say, Brooklyn or Rio.

Anyway, there's also a lot of actual plot stuff revolving around a (mostly) retired agent who got assigned to find a mole in MI6, but instead he wound up dead. So the actual point of the book is about finding a bunch of stuff he left behind in order to find out who the mole was, while the mole tries to find all the stuff as well in order to preserve their identity.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ probably, for some scary scenes with a bunch of pirates hijacking a ship and also some fight scenes and explosions. It'd make a pretty decent stealth action videogame.

Like the others, this one gets 4 stars.

 

Favorite lines:

 

    "You know the Prince of Wales and you call him Jimmy?" asked Sydney.

    Page 408.

(Endnote: Throwing a sea urchin at them is officially my favorite way anyone in this series has ever incapacitated a bad guy.)

"City Spies: Forbidden City" by James Ponti

After reading book 4 a while back, I've gotten book 3 of this series out of the library as well. This one has less hacking and explosions and more sneaking around and playing chess. Actual chess, as well as metaphorical chess.

Basically, there's this guy from North Korea who's made it as plain as he can that he doesn't want to be in North Korea while maintaining plausible deniability. Both the good guys and the bad guys want to recruit him. Also there's a bunch of stolen nuclear warheads, and chess. (I don't know tons about chess. Like, I can usually hold my own against other relative beginners, but I don't know the names of any openings or tactics or anything, or even how to do them.)

There's one plot point that revolves around a social media account that occasionally posts the same picture of St. Basil's Cathedral. However, something's off: the colors on the domes are slightly different each time. My guess as to a possible way of decoding it was, "Why don't you check how the computer encodes the colors and see if that gives you any clues?" |Guess how they cracked it.|

There's another character who's peripherally in this, and who's apparently a former member of the spy team: Charlotte. Her name is both a person name and a city name, so it didn't trip me up. Kat (Kathmandu) still does, though; I keep wanting to call her Katherine. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for kidnapping and some chase scenes. Like the next one, it would be a fairly fun stealth game. Unless they made a few alterations or had the chess take place in cutscenes, though, it would get a bit tedious doing all that, especially since most of the people chessing at each other are supposed to be really good at it and most of the people who would play the game aren't.

This one is as good as the next one, which is to say, I give it 4 stars.

(Endnote: I think I'll get book 2 out of the library next, and then book 1, and then I'll have read the entire series in reverse order.)

"City Spies: City of the Dead" by James Ponti

Turns out this is like book 4 in a series, but I didn't know that at the time I grabbed it off the library shelf. However, as with good books-in-series, I wasn't totally lost. True, I didn't know who anyone was, but that didn't matter; the story held up without prior series knowledge.

Anyway, it was fun! I did have a bit of a hard time believing that MI6 would actually hire a bunch of teens and tweens as spies, but it's the series premise, and it wasn't too much of an ordeal to suspend my disbelief. The plot involves cyberattacks and museum heists and a lot of hacking, which seems to be portrayed more realistically than most times; instead of videogame hacking minigames or anything like that, it's more "stick a virus-laden thumbdrive into the computer".

Also, all the main characters have code names that are just city names. The one this book focused on is called Kat; it's short for Kathmandu, but I kept thinking it was short for Katherine. The others are Paris (who's a boy, despite his code name tripping me up a lot), Sydney (a rather loud girl with strong opinions who carries around both hairspray and explosives), Rio (who's good at sleight of hand and stuff like that), and Brooklyn (le hacker). Also, they add another member partway through the book: Robert, the actual child of the guy who adopted all the rest of the main characters.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for scary-ish scenes and explosions. It'd probably make a fun stealth game, although they'd probably de-realistic the hacking because "stick a virus-laden thumbdrive into the computer" just isn't as fun as a hacking minigame.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. I liked most of the characters, and the plot kept me engaged, and that is almost assuredly the single most stereotypical-book-review sentence I've ever said on this blog. All of this is a long wind-up to make the fact that I rated it 4 stars a tad more interesting.

(Endnote: I kind of want to go read the other three books in the series now.)