The Bicycle Spy

Yona Zeldis McDonough's The Bicycle Spy is a wartime story for 9 year olds about a boy who works out what he has really been delivering.

What happens

Marcel is twelve, small for his age, wears glasses and gets called shrimp by the older boys. What he's good at is riding. He's read everything he can find about the Tour de France, and he rides every single day to get faster.

There's no Tour any more. France has been occupied since 1940, and there hasn't been a race since, which is one more thing Marcel holds against the Germans.

His parents keep a bakery, and lately they've had him cycling loaves out to his aunt and uncle far more often than usual. His mother is oddly sharp with him about it. His father sends a gingerbread cake along too, for any soldier who stops him at the bridge.

Then Marcel, hungry and on his own at the roadside, cuts into one of the loaves and his penknife hits paper.

It's a note in his father's handwriting about a crowded bridge and a picnic that has to move. He reads it three times before working out that his parents are in the Resistance, and that he's been carrying messages for weeks without knowing.

What he does next is the best bit of the book. He eats the evidence, crumbles the rest into the woods for the birds, cuts a slit in the bottom of the second loaf, slides the note in and scorches the bread black with a match so it just looks over-baked. Then he hands it over and can't look his uncle in the eye.

There's a new girl at school too. Delphine has a leather scrapbook of Tour winners her grandfather started and her father added to, with a snip of a real racing jersey glued in, and she's the better rider. She also flinches at something a classmate says, and she won't let anybody come to her house.

You should know what that something is. A boy in the playground says something ugly about Jews, in the flat casual way people did, and nobody but Marcel notices what it does to Delphine. Marcel knows exactly what happens to Resistance members who get caught, too. They're interrogated, imprisoned, sometimes shot, and he thinks about it while he pedals. It's pitched for nine, not sanded smooth.

What to read next

If this one lands, The Night Crossing is in the library as well. Clara's family are Jewish in Austria in 1938, and their way out is a long walk to the Swiss border at night.