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

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You
by Ally Carter
Copyright 2006
Hyperion - Young Adult/Spies
284 pages, including that messed-up page in the middle

I need to trade my copy of this book because I have no idea what happened on pages 133-34, since I got an extra page 141-42 stuck in the middle of my book. Grrr. Otherwise, I loved this story.

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You is the first book in the Gallagher Girls series. I found the second in the series at a bargain price, last year, and whipped right through it. So, when I needed a book to read while I waited out a storm in the Target Starbucks, I bought a copy of the first. It's been on my wish list for eons, after all. I sipped Tazo tea and occasionally jumped at noisy thunder while reading, then we went home during a break in the weather.

I wish I'd known there was a wonky page in the middle, so that I could have exchanged the book right then and there, since Target is at least 50 miles away from us.

Since I'd Tell You, etc., is the first in a series, there's a good bit of set-up and the book is not quite as exciting as the second in the series. We're introduced to Cammie Morgan, the heroine whose mother is the headmistress of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women -- a spy school masquerading as an exclusive prep school for geniuses. In the second book, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, Cammie frequently refers back to her experiences in this first book so I had a little bit of expectatation going.

In I'd Tell You, etc., Cammie meets a boy who is not a spy. In fact, if he knew she attended Gallagher Academy, he wouldn't have anything to do with her. The Gallagher girls are thought to be rich snobs. Actually, most of them are pretty wealthy, but that's beside the point. Their cover is a good one and because of it, the people of the nearby town are not particularly friendly to the Gallagher students. But, when Cammie meets Josh and realizes she wants to get to know him better, she tells him she's homeschooled to keep him from running away.

Cammie and her friends have to check Josh out to make sure he's not trying to infiltrate Gallagher Academy, so they tap into his email and dig in his trash and then write up reports about what they've discovered. Eventually, Cammie and Josh manage to get together, but not for long because Josh discovers the truth about Cammie and gets in the way of her class final.

4/5 - The fact that this book is the first in a series makes it just a tad less exciting because the author has to spend some time setting the scene, but I probably wouldn't have noticed, had I read the series in order. I loved this book. Ally Carter's writing is clever, witty, adventurous and fun. There's no bad language, the violence is pretty tame, and the dating is clean. This book is very family-friendly, as is the next in the series.

I highly recommend reading this series in order. Because Cammie refers back to her experience with Josh in the second book, I already knew how this particular book ended. It didn't bother me, but I did have some expectations of how things would occur and that threw me a bit.

I've got to hop on the treadmill, but I'll try to whip out another review, later today. I've only got one left on that list I wrote up, last week, and then two that I've since finished. Have you noticed that my sidebar hasn't changed? I'm reading a bit slower than usual (and I'm not a fast reader) but I hope to finish both Mr. Darcy's Great Escape and The Things They Carried within the next couple of days, and then we can change the sidebar scenery. That would be good.
You've probably noticed that I haven't posted many photographs in a while, if you're one of my regular readers. That's because I haven't gone anywhere! I've been stuck in this house for months! I'm going to try to take a field trip -- maybe the zoo or just a drive around town to look for hawks -- very soon. I think a photo-free blog can get a little boring, after a while.