The League of Unexceptional Children

Gitty Daneshvari's The League of Unexceptional Children is a spy story for 9 year olds about two children nobody can remember.

What happens

Jonathan Murray is twelve and completely average. Average at school, at sport, at everything the world bothers to measure. Teachers have called him Hank and Salvador. A boy who has lived three doors away his whole life greets him as the new kid.

Shelley Brown has the same problem with a twist. She talks constantly, in a voice so soft it blends into the background. She once sang the whole national anthem in front of her class and nobody noticed.

She also retracts about half of what she says, roughly five seconds after saying it, which is a running joke that does not get old.

It all kicks off with a security guard. Arthur Pelton sits on a stool by a disused White House gate and his wife has just suggested a trained seal could do his job. So when a very small man in sunglasses says the Secret Service needs him, Arthur cannot open that gate fast enough.

By the end of the night the vice president has been kidnapped and a code has been stolen.

Which is where Jonathan and Shelley come in, because the one useful thing about children nobody looks at is that nobody looks at them.

The pleasure here is the telling. The narrator is a comedian. Evanston is a town so competitive that the community patrol has quietly given the birds laryngitis to keep the noise down, and 98.5 per cent of the school leavers go to Ivy League universities while the other 1.5 per cent flee the country.

Jonathan's parents are a joy. They never grew up, they shop at a petrol station, and they are genuinely thrilled about his straight Cs.

One small warning. Nurse Maidenkirk, who isn't a nurse, cheers herself up with grim stories. A cat hit by a car, a woman who died of an infected paper cut, and she carries a needle about with her. It's all played for laughs and none of it happens on the page, but a squeamish child will notice.

Underneath the jokes there's something a bit more tender. Both of these children have decided they're nothing special, and a stranger has just told them that the thing they hate about themselves is the most useful thing in the country.

What to read next

There's another job waiting in the library. The Kids Who Knew Too Little sends Jonathan and Shelley across Europe, trying to get inside a secret society that would rather they didn't.