The Ministry of Unladylike Activity by Robin Stevens

The Ministry of Unladylike Activity by Robin Stevens
Buy The Ministry of Unladylike Activity by Robin Stevens at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: Ruth Ng
Summary: This is a lively, fun, children’s whodunnit, with a beautifully crafted WWII setting.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 416	Date: October 2022
Publisher: Puffin
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9780241429860
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May Wong is a long way from her family in Hong Kong. She’s stuck in her school, Deepdean, and desperate to get away, and do something useful to help end the war and to get home. She just knows that she would make the perfect spy! And when she finds herself turned away by the Ministry, she takes matters into her own hands, along with a boy she meets outside the Ministry, Eric. They both go undercover in a large country house, pretending to be evacuees, in an attempt to prove that someone there is passing secrets to the Nazis. But there is a lot more going on in Elysium Hall than either them have imagined, and suddenly they find themselves in the middle of a murder scene, with even more to try to unravel and solve.

I hadn’t read any of the previous books by Robin Stevens, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about them. You don’t need to know the previous series for this one, since this book is taking the stories along with a slightly different set of characters. May is Hazel’s sister, if that helps those in the know, (Hazel is one of the girls in the previous series of stories).

May is a lively, vibrant character. I didn’t always like her, so I have to say that I initially struggled with that. But I did like Eric a lot, and I also enjoyed Nuala’s character too. The interactions between them are often funny, and it’s great to watch them learn to understand each other and start to respect each other. They’re all quite individual characters, and the interplay between them is intriguing and sometimes funny. It’s good to see each of them develop their skills and strengths, and to see May and Nuala start to work together rather than competing against each other.

Set during the second world war, and you really get a good feel for the times without it being a history lesson. There is a sense of the devastation and loss of war, but without it being overwhelming to read. It’s written with a great deal of care and thought, so we even see Eric talking about how initially he was swept up in all the fervour in Germany, before everyone realised what the Nazis were really about. She doesn’t romanticise the war, which can happen sometimes, but handles it all with great sensitivity. I think this, really, is the strongest aspect of the book. I’ve always enjoyed WWII children’s stories, and this is definitely a good one!

The whole plot twists and turns, sometimes in a slightly bewildering manner! But helpfully the characters themselves are often then working through a step by step process of who can be eliminated from the suspects, or who was doing what and at what time and where, so if you’re not quite sure where you’re at, you can catch up that way! I had absolutely no idea who had done what, so I was left guessing throughout. There are murders through the story, but I didn’t feel anything was too awfully gory or upsetting, so the stories work as a great introduction to crime fiction, and of coure having the kids solve everything is the real draw. I was a huge fan of Harriet the Spy as a child, and after reading I had my own notebook to jot down neighbourhood happenings! I can see reading this as a child would have seen me convinced that I was absolutely destined to be a spy, or a detective!

There’s plenty of action and suspense, and the teasing out of what happened is engaging and intriguing. This is quite a long book, but the chapters are short, so it doesn’t feel difficult to read. It’s probably best for the 8 to 12 age group, but I enjoyed it as a grown-up reader too!

You might also enjoy going back, if you haven’t already, and reading this by the same author Murder Most Unladylike.

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