Unlikely hero 12-year-old Benjamin Ripley narrates this page-turning thriller. When a James Bond-type agent from the CIA shows up and whisks the young math whiz off to the Academy of Espionage, a top-secret spy school, his life becomes interesting... and endangered.
Ben fails his first test, a staged ambush, and he begins to question his competency as a spy. But then he meets Erica, a talented student who smells of lilacs and gunpowder, and who saves his hide repeatedly. Ben quickly learns, through a series of attempts on his life, that nothing is what it seems and that the eccentric teachers and students are both expert at obfuscation and also disconcertingly inept. When Ben discovers a bomb in the school's underground passageways, he suspects a double agent at work and believes he's been set up as bait in a CIA cryptology scam meant to misdirect the enemy.
Ben begins thinking like a sleuth as he and Erica uncover plot and counterplot. His quick wit and wry sensibility bring levity to the brisk prose, as when he tries to get himself expelled by insulting the head of the school: "The principal turned as red as the bottom of a baboon." Gibbs (Belly Up) fashions a plot as twisty as a braid, teeming with false leads and cool spy stuff such as statues that serve as entrances to hidden staircases. By tale's end, Ben gains a sense of belonging and proves himself to be quite a spiffy spy. --Bette Wendell-Branco, bookseller emerita and reviewer