I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In a way ever since Meg Cabot finished her Princess Diary books, I’ve been searching for a series to fill the Mia shaped hole in my life. And I think Cammie and her fellow Gallagher Girls might just fit the bill.
Seriously, the Gallagher Girls books are great. Light and fun and breezy reads, full of a sort of a prose that rolls along and can’t help but take you along for the ride. They’re not the most ‘high literary’ sort of texts but they are very, very pleasing and definitely feel a hole.
This is the first in the series. Cammie is a member of Gallagher Academy. Gallagher Academy isn’t the most everyday of schools. On the surface it’s a posh single sex school, but in reality it’s a school for spies. Which is GREAT. The girls are all powerful, brave characters with complexity, flaws and the ability to speak a gazillion languages and shake a tail. It’s a nice spin on the boarding school trope and one that Carter plays with quite joyously.
I think that one of the great joys of the school story in the twenty-first century is that it’s constantly being reinvented. Carter’s created a series that features everything – a forbidden love, painful past and bad girls come good. And it works. It really, really works.
Daisy May Johnson 