I just loved this funny contemporary story. Maggie is a spy. She is also seventeen. She and her parents have traveled the world working for the Collective—a super-secret organization. Her mother is an excellent hacker, her father has a gift for languages, and Maggie is an excellent safe-cracker. Their latest case—and Maggie's first solo job—has her entering new territory. She has to go to high school! Maggie is enrolled in an exclusive New York City private school where she has to befriend Jesse Oliver in order to find out if his magazine owner father is going to publish an article that will out Maggie and the other spies who work for the Collective.Maggie wasn't expecting to find a friend or to fall in love with her target. Almost the first person she meets at the school is Roux who is a friendless poor little rich girl. Their personalities click and Maggie becomes her only friend. It is a nice benefit that she has also known Jesse since they were pre-schoolers. When Maggie meets Jesse, she is immediately attracted to him because he is smart and nice and funny. She goes to his Halloween party and manages to find a flash drive in a hidden safe but she also gets closer to both Roux and Jesse making her feel really guilty about the secrets she has to keep.I loved the humor in this story. I still break out laughing when I think about Jesse and Maggie's first date and ice skating. While I was reading that scene, I had to keep setting my Kindle down to wipe away the tears of laughter that kept blurring my vision. I loved the relationship that Maggie had with her parents and their friend Angelo. It was clear that they were both loving and supportive and Angelo filled the role of a benevolent uncle. Maggie's relationship highlighted the bad relationships that both Jesse and Roux had with their parents. Roux's parents had more or less abandoned her. She lived alone in a luxurious penthouse apartment with a housekeeper who didn't work evenings or weekends. Lots of Roux's problems came from her innate loneliness and her desire to find someone to love her. Jesse's parents had just been through a divorce. His father was so obsessed with his business that he didn't talk to Jesse and his mother has disappeared out of his life.Readers of contemporaries will find much to love in the novel. I look forward to sharing it with the students in my high school media center.
