Also Known As Paperback – November 12, 2013

4.5 Laugh Out Loud StarsOne thing that can really grab me in a book is the dialogue. If the dialogue is really good I will let some of the plot stuff slide since I’m having such a fun time reading through the characters conversations. I LOVED the hilarious dialogue in this book. Also, I want a teenager to sound like a teenager; I don’t need them to be sophisticated, there should be a general silliness to them as they are discovering language and how to communicate the abundance of new emotions and experiences. This book had that in spades and I giggled out right giggled at so many conversations and instances.Maggie has lived an exotic life of intrigue and mystery in her sixteen years. Her parents are spies and she is a masterful safe cracker. She has had an unusual upbringing traveling all over the globe righting wrongs and getting the goods on the bad guys. But she has always been in the background, her parents do the intel work and then she comes in at the end to crack the safe and get the proof. That is until now. She had been given her first assignment as the front man and she is totally excited.Holy crap!” I said. “Hallelujah, it’s a miracle! I finally get to do something besides watch everyone else have fun!” I raised my bagel in the air like an award, then pretended to wipe away tears. “This just means so much to me! I’d like to thank all the little people that I crushed on my way to the top.Maggie has been home schooled her entire life but the assignment means that she will need to attend High School. I’m not sure that all her time as a spy has prepared her for this.I have to say that I absolutely adored the characters and their relationships in this. First there is Maggie and her parents. They have always worked as a team and it has really been the three of them against the world. Maggie has been a remarkably easy teenager up until now, probably because she never had a relationship of any kind with anyone her own age, but it seems the game has changed and none of them are sure what to do.“Look, I’m sorry, but what do you want?” I said. “You signed me up for this, so this is what I have to do. I have to go to Halloween parties and spend time with people! It’s my job!”“It’s two thirty in the morning!” my mom cried. “In Manhattan! Do you know all the things that could have happened to you?”I looked at my parents like they were speaking Korean. (And to be fair, my dad can speak Korean, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.)But it is always clear that they are trying and this is just new to all of them.Maggie finally gets to make a friend her own age. Roux is absolutely positively fantastic and I want a friend just like her. She is a little bit of a mess but in the most fun way. Roux isn’t perfect she is lonely, drinks and had an unfortunate incident last year but I loved her all the more for it.“Were you a Mean Girl?” I asked. “I saw the movie.”Roux paused for a long time before finally saying, “Yes. I was a bitch to people. I talked about girls, made up rumors, all of that. Ever since fifth grade.”“So now you’re persona non grata,” I said. “Wow. Social justice, like, never happens. I’m sorry!” I told her when she frowned and started to walk away. “I’m really sorry, it just slipped out.”“Yes, please, enjoy my karmic retribution.Who better to steer Maggie through the social jungle that is high school and also help her with Jesse Oliver her assignment that just happens to be a cute boy, the first cute boy who Maggie has had a non-imaginary conversation with. I loved the cute semi-innocent chemistry between them. They have a very natural playful banter that is perfect for that age.I yelped and quickly moved to cover my hand. “It’s being resized at the jeweler’s!”“I don’t want to make it weird or anything!” he said, even though we were both laughing by now. “I just couldn’t help but notice!”“It was sending me into diabetic shock just by wearing it!” I cried. “I didn’t do it for me, I did it for us!”There is also Angelo who I just adored. He is like your grandfather if your grandfather was a world renowned forger, with great taste in clothes, who draws picture clues for where you are supposed to meet. Maybe he isn’t even old enough to be your grandfather perhaps a super cool uncle or something. He always has Maggie’s back and I loved the time they spent together.I had soooo much fun with this book. It isn’t all spying and espionage, but I never cared. It was a lot of time trying to get to the information wanted and discovering that it is hard to be a fake friend and have fake emotions when you really like the people you are spending time with and it is easy to get distracted from the mission when the cute boy who is your target is so much fun to spend time with.“Are you insane?” my mother said to him. “What were you thinking!”My dad closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maggie,” he said, “explain to me again how you have a date.”“Um, he asked?” No one said a word. “And I said yes?”Plus Jesse Oliver was cute and sincere and a little bit dorkie but in the best way possibly. How could she possibly say no? He was like the cutest wounded puppy in the litter.The only downfall to the entire book was possibly the lack of super spying. She is a wiz safecracker that means she doesn’t chase the bad guys. They have other people to do that. I really appreciate that they didn’t try to make her a self-defense expert or something like that. She is a teenage safe cracker with a few other spy related skills and she sticks to what she is good at.I recommend this to anyone who wants a super fun, hilarious read that will have you giggling out loud. This is one of the better YA books I’ve read recently perfect for 12-18 age range, or the young at heart.

Your teen years are formidable. It seems like you will barely survive, but you eke out the other side relatively unscathed and tougher for the challenge. But what if you were raised by international spies, a lock picking, safe cracking prodigy (given Master Locks to play with and crack as a toddler), and had never gone to school, gone to a dance, or even kissed a boy? In Also Known As by Robin Benway, Maggie is up for her first official case for the group of Good Guy Spies they work for: going to high school and fitting in!When news of a journalist writing an article about the group of spies her family works for, thereby blowing their cover, is released, Maggie is given her first job: infiltrate the high school of the journalist's son and get the evidence for the story back. This job is even more important than the other "do-good" jobs Maggie has been a part of before, because now her family's safety is in jeopardy. Even though the group of spies only work their magic for good, stopping bad guys, toppling evil, and returning items to those good people who they were taken from, she is still a spy, complete with aliases and multiple passports. Infiltrating a high school sounds relatively harmless, unless you have ever been a new kid before. Then you know just how treacherous this assignment really was. Terrifying in fact.To make matters worse, Jesse Oliver, the mark, is a popular bad-boy. Maggie knows she has no chance of getting to him without an in, so she makes friends with an eccentric former Queen Bee named Roux. While Roux is currently a social-outcast, she still makes for a good in to Jesse Oliver's Halloween party. But after the party, Maggie realizes there is more to Jesse Oliver (she likes to say his full name!) than Maggie had expected. As she gets closer to him, she realizes she doesn't want him to just be a mark. But that would be breaking the cardinal rule for a spy: never get too close.This was a fun, somewhat young, spy story, much in the same vein as Ally Carter's Gallagher Girls series. Maggie was a typical teenager, complete with sarcasm, snark, and a desire to be kissed by a cute boy, but it was her entourage that was the most fun. You find yourself really liking Jesse Oliver, and Roux is hilarious. I like the fact that Roux was a former-Queen Bee, fallen from her throne. It made her so much more interesting, and her hilarious rambling diatribes were so much fun! When she came face to face with Angelo, the family's spy friend, I thought I was going to die! Too funny!But this is a rather young story. It would be good for any young reader transitioning from Middle Readers to YA. The cover screams girl book, but if you can get a boy to read it, I can see them being equally entertained, especially since Maggie isn't terribly "girly". The spy stuff isn't terribly dangerous, but made for a fun read. I am looking forward to the sequel to this story to see what happens to everyone!

Maggie Silver is a 16-year-old safecracker and daughter of international spies who work for the group called the Collective.When she gets her 1st solo assignment as a spy at a private high school in New York, she's very excited. After she befriends with Roux & becomes smitten with her target, Jesse Oliver, it's becoming harder for Maggie to keep her cover while trying to collect the evidence from Jesse's father's safe.While Maggie is a fun teenager girl, I don't like her new friends much, not about the binge drinking and devil-may-care attitude of spoiled rich kids.I guess this series is written for YA, but the way these kids are drinking and skipping schools are not a good examples at all.

BEWARE if you are buying this book from Amazon. One star is not for the book itself, but for Amazon. I bought this book for my daughter, who had read Spy Society by the author and loved it. Only when she started to read it did we realise that this is THE SAME BOOK under a different title. Amazon should really make it clear that this book has been published with two different titles (presumably one in the UK and one in the US?)Very disappointing from Amazon not to be clear.

Un livre qui se lit vite mais dont je garderai pas un souvenir longtemps. Les relations sont mignonnes mais je m'attendais à des comportements plus réfléchis que des ados lambda. L'espionnage est seulement prétexte à l'émancipation de Maggy ! Une lecture sans prise de tête qui peut plaire a des ados.