Orphan Monster Spy

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Once again we are thrust into the dangerous and absorbing world of Sarah. She is a character that I greatly enjoy being around. She can be feisty and determined, she is driven by a very singular focus and if you have read the first in this series it is all too apparent why this is. And to be honest, even if you haven't, knowing she is a Jewish girl in Nazi Germany would be enough. To me, she is a great counterpart to those very male driven spy novels about world war two. Now obviously one can not act as a spy alone, you must be part of a network for all this sort of thing to work. So queue just that, with this, we get just what you would expect from any such novel. Maybe a touch cliched but I think this book knows what it's aiming for and such they fit within the context of the narrative. Likewise are the villains of this piece. Whilst just having Nazis would I think, be enough for anyone Here they get ramped up to eleven. A fast-paced journey that will leave anyone wanting more. Topped with witty writing and a boatload of action, this book leaves me extremely ecstatic for more work from Matt Killeen..." The narrative isn't linear, it jumps around a little between different times in Sarah's life, and I loved how this slowly disclosed her past. It showed why she was so resourceful and skilled already, and sometimes it made my heart ache.

I was very interested in the history notes at the end though. That was interesting, well written and the best part of this whole thing. Maybe this author should write nonfiction. For the most part, the writing is strong. However, whilst it’s clear and relatively fast-paced, the internal dialogue is intrusive and repetitive - the constant reminders of Sarah’s Jewishness in particular. Sure, she must be hyperconscious of the fact, but I as a reader have already grasped that given the historical context. Killeen is clearly intelligent, and this makes the peppering of clunky German phrases and terrible action scenes harder to bear.Matt Killeen's debut novel introduces us to Sarah Goldstein, a 15 year old Jewish girl, who may turn out to be the new heroine of YA fiction. She's intelligent, athletic, multilingual & able to think on her feet in a crisis. She'll need all these attributes when she becomes a spy against the Nazis, working for a British agent, in this fast paced World War 2 thriller. The whole novel felt electric, and had a very presence that I haven't had from a book in this genre for a good while ( The Color of Secrets and Susanna Kearsley are two that come to mind). This book is a World War II novel. The main protagonist is Sarah, who is a Jew with an Aryan appearance. After her mother get killed abandoned and alone she meets a man who turns out it be a spy. She is recruited by him to to be a spy and go inside and infiltrated a Nazi boarding school. Right now, history is repeating. The very things for which the teenagers who confronted the Third Reich sacrificed so much are under threat. Resistance has never been so important. I hope that the readers of Orphan Monster Spy will part of that.

The world building and the insight to Nazi time is done very brilliantly, you can see the research done.. It has a lot of German words and I had to constantly search and find out their meaning (because well I didn't know any of them, totally new to me). But they provided a great insight into those times. Killeen crams in plenty of great story ideas into this terrific novel that will appeal to young & old readers alike. In his notes at the end of the novel it's quite amazing to see how many real people & situations inspired this story. He also notes that when he was feeling down while writing someone told him that he "could be the YA Graham Greene" & after reading this book I think they may be right! Whatever else I read in the next twelve months Orphan Monster Spy is going to a hard one to beat as my favourite book of the year. Being a massive WWII buff who spent a fair amount of time studying this horrendous time of war, I have to appreciate the amount of effort that Killeen has gone through to capture the darkness of this time period, the ferocity of this war and the grim casualties that happen along the way. And as much as people think that this book is dark and doesn’t reflect the war correctly, I ask you to keep in mind that there was a German camp that used to skin their victims with tattoos and these were turned into gloves and lampshades. So it’s best to keep in mind that in times of war, nothing is too dark and nothing is out of the question when it comes of the human’s nasty capability. In this book you can see two warring personalities coming out. The first being that she is a young girl. She isnt confident, she realises she could die. All she wants is to be loved, held. She latches on to the first person that shows her this. She spends a lot of time basically forgetting to keep her secrets, and starts believing that she is too young for this. Bestselling author Alexandra Christo, author of TikTok sensation To Kill a Kingdom, introduces her new book, The Night Hunt (Hot Key Books), a dark...

With that in mind Killeen serves up the darkness of the war in a brutal yet interesting way that shows a true side of the darkness that could happen but also ensuring that the readers of this book don’t have nightmares for the rest of their lives. Winner of Hounslow Teen Reads Award 2019. Short-listed for The Great Reads Award 2018 and Ealing Teen Reads Award 2019 and Costa Children’s Book Award 2018 and Cheshire Schools’ Book Award 2019 and Amazing Book Awards 2019 and The Branford Boase Award 2019 and Young Quills Award for Historical Fiction 2019. Long-listed for Wirral Book Award 2018. Nominated for The CILIP Carnegie Medal 2019. I think the way that Matt Killeen portrayed racism within this book was well done, it explored the white saviour trope and how our main character Sarah has implicit bias. I also enjoyed the "letters" that Sarah wrote in her head when things were getting too much. This book was a great progression on from the first book, whilst still taking things in a completely different direction. I adore Matt Killeen's writing, he is able to evoke powerful images in my minds eye as well as allowing you to empathise will all of the characters and their emotions. A different (for me) aspect of World War Two I hadn't read/heard much about... I have vague memories of hearing something, but most likely not in my history class in high school. It was all very fascinating to me and had me on the edge of my seat for most of the narrative.