I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

This book by Ally Carter is the first in a long series. Personally, I found it to be cute and just the sort of thing I'd be gushing over if I were still a teenage girl. But because I left my teen years behind me 10 years ago, and because I'm a mom of future teenage girls, I obviously found a few flaws with this story.

First, let me say that the story idea was definitely clever. It was creative and fun for me and so I give it an overall 3.5 stars.

The story is told in first person from the main character's POV (that's point of view), which didn't really bother me either. I like reading books like that from time to time. What irritated me was her tendancy to throw in sentences written in foreign languages without a translation. Okay, so the author wants to demonstrate her point about how these girls are teenage spies in training and can speak a myriad of languages. Fine. I get that. But how about translating the sentences for those of us who don't speak French or Russian or whatever? Thank goodness for smartphones and google translate. Ih was able to hold my phone up to the page and get the general idea of the conversation.

I would have also liked a more detailed explanation of some of those 'spyish' terms and phrases. I don't watch a lot of espionage themed stuff, so honeypot is probably one of the only terms I recognized. As the author, she should have considered that just knowing the terms is not enough. She should have considered the reader who would not want to turn to Google or Siri every time a term specific to the spy trade was used. All I'm saying is that a little explanation would have been nice.

There were several areas where I felt that the flow of the story was disrupted by the author trying too hard to remind us that our heroine was a teenage girl. She wrote with abbreviations too often or even broke up paragraphys by interrupting the story with the character's commentary. I found this to be highly annoying.

And my final complaint would have to be how she didn't go into detail about Cammie and Josh's dates. This is a Young Adult fiction novel. And let's face it, teenage girls want to read about how warm and soft a boy's hand feels when he holds a girl's hand for the first time or how soft and smooth his lips were the first time she kissed him. We don't want a quick summary of 'we kissed, but I won't tell you because that's private' in parenthesis. That's no fun. We want the opportuity to be allowed to feel all mushy and starry eyed.

Despite my minor complaints, I will be seeking out Ms. Carter's sequel "Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy", because, as I said before, the book was fun. And that's what fiction books are for. :) Happy Reading!