about the book
When twelve-year-old Ben Ripley gets home after his miserable day in school, he finds a suave dude in a tuxedo sitting on his living room couch. The guy is Alexander Hale, a CIA spy!
Ben is a math genius, so it’s not totally surprising when Hale tells this awkward kid he’s been picked to attend the top secret CIA Espionage Academy. Ben has always wanted to be a spy!
While his parents think he has been whisked off to an elite dorky boarding school, Ben finds himself at the highly secure Washington DC campus. But his first day is far from what he expected. The classes are boring. The food is atrocious. A fellow student asks him to hack into the mainframe. He is nearly kidnapped, is forced to evade bullets and ninjas, and is targeted for assassination! Turns out, he was brought to the school to be bait!
SPYDER, an organization of rogue agents, has planted a mole. Very sensitive information is being leaked. To flush out the mole, false rumors have been spread about Ben’s supposedly fantastic cryptography skills.
This is bad! Not only has he got to use what little espionage skills he has learned, he has to identify the mole, evade the kidnappers, and maintain his cool in front of the most beautiful classmate he has ever met, Erica Hale. You’d think a CIA academy would be run by some pretty smart people, but these people are incompetent. It’s up to Ben to figure it all out.
And he has to do it fast. Somewhere a bomb is ticking…a very big bomb!
about the author
Stuart Gibbs was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but grew up in San Antonio, Texas. As a kid, he loved animals and spent as much time as he could at the zoo. In fifth grade he was amazed to learn that some kids weren’t as crazy about animals as he was.
Stuart also loved books and knew he was going to be a writer. He wrote lots of stories, and I’ll wager that many were about animals! Stuart went to the University of Pennsylvania, and while studying capybaras, the world’s largest rodent, he was offered a job to continue his studies at the zoo. He became one the the world’s foremost experts on capybaras …mainly because no one else was studying them!
Stuart went on to write several screenplays and developed television shows for Disney, Nickelodeon, ABC, and Fox. But with two children at home, he decided to go back to his first love and write a book for kids. Setting the plot in a zoo was, of course, his first choice for his first published book, Belly Up.
Since he saw his first spy movie at the age of seven, Stuart has been fascinated with James Bond. He instantly started to imagine what it would be like to be Bond’s son, Jimmy Bond (agent 006 ½). He even wrote a story called ”The Kid With The Golden Water Pistol.” So Stuart just knew that Ben Ripley’s adventures in Spy School would be cool and funny.
Stuart lives with his wife Suzanne and his two children Dashiell and Violet, in Los Angeles, California.
Sources:
Author website
Author interview : Author Turf
Author interview : Goodreads
Author biography: Simon & Schuster
Also by Stuart Gibbs:
Spy Camp (Spy School, Book 2). Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. 2013.
The Last Musketeer. Harper Collins. 2011.
Belly Up. Simon & Schuster. 2010.
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