Island of Spies
by Sheila Turnage
Intermediate    Dial    384 pp.
9/22    9780735231252    $17.99

For this freewheeling detective story, Turnage chooses a particular and intriguing setting: Hatteras Island off the coast of North Carolina in 1942. In the early stages of the American involvement in WWII, ­German U-boats were stationed off this coast, a fact largely hidden from the public. These conditions of secrecy, threat, and espionage make a perfect backdrop for an elaborate tale in which twelve-year-old Stick and her sidekicks, Rain and Neb, tackle a cluster of mysteries involving—among other tropes—spies, double agents, strategic eavesdropping, code-breaking, clue-solving, secret messages in lemon juice, explosives, an attempted arsenic poisoning, and a fatal snake bite. The pace slows very briefly for more naturalistic plot points such as Stick’s father being missing in action and the endemic racism directed toward Rain and her mother, but the narrative is mainly tried and true: plucky kids outwitting the adults. An added bonus is that our narrator, Stick, is a keen reader of the encyclopedia and of potboiler fiction and has mastered both a wide-ranging compendium of scientific facts and a quippy tough-guy argot, with its delicious metaphors, all appropriate to the period. Her sister’s boyfriend has “dimples deep enough to back a Ford into.” Funny, crisp, and clever.

From the January/February 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.