Ruby Redfort: Take Your Last Breath

Ruby Redfort: Take Your Last Breath is Lauren Child's second spy story for 9 year olds, and this time she puts her thirteen year old code cracker underwater.

What happens

It opens with a dive instructor explaining, cheerfully, that conditions are perfect for sharks.

If one comes at you, swim towards it. It will probably work out you are not lunch. If it does not work out that you are not lunch, it will check with its teeth, and you can wave goodbye to an arm.

Ruby, who is not quite five feet tall in fins, asks the obvious follow up questions. She needs her arms for waving. Her legs come in handy too.

Everybody else at the camp is a full time agent. Ruby is the only one still going to school.

She got recruited because she is a genius with codes. She won the Junior Code-Cracker Championships at seven and turned down a place at Harvard at eight, because she did not fancy being thought of as a geek freak.

The job also has a vacancy because the last code breaker was killed by a villain called Count von Viscount. That is told to you in a couple of flat sentences near the start. There is no scene, nobody grieves on the page, and it is over before it lands. Still, if your reader hates hearing about a murder at all, that is the moment to know about.

The fun of these books is Ruby's mouth. She answers back constantly, she keeps seventy-nine numbered rules for living, and she tells her parents things that are technically true so they arrive at the wrong conclusion all by themselves. RULE 65 is that people believe what they wanna believe.

Her dive teacher, Kekoa, barely speaks. Ruby, who cannot stop, finds this completely baffling. Their conversation underwater is one word each.

And there is a real fear in here, which is nice to see in a girl who is scared of nothing else. Ruby is claustrophobic. Cave diving means squeezing through gaps in rock into spaces that might be short of air. She hopes very much never to do it again.

You can probably guess how that goes.

What to read next

If your reader would rather start at the beginning, Look Into My Eyes has Ruby at home in Twinford with six hundred and twenty two notebooks under her floorboards, on the day someone finally comes looking for her.