The Ministry of Unladylike Activity

Robin Stevens's The Ministry of Unladylike Activity is a wartime spy mystery for 10 year olds, told by a girl who has decided she's going to help win the war herself.

What happens

May Wong is ten (nearly eleven, as she'd want you to know). She's from Hong Kong, she's stuck at an English boarding school she can't stand, and it's 1940. Her big sister Hazel is a spy. Hazel won't admit it, but May knows.

So May pinches a note from Hazel's handbag, runs away from school and finds her way to a red door in London. On the step is Eric, who got there by solving a newspaper crossword. His family escaped Germany because the Nazis hated people who look like them, and now the British have taken his papa away for being German.

The grown-ups behind the red door tell them to go home. Instead they go undercover as evacuees, to a grey stone house near Coventry where someone may be sending secrets to Berlin.

May is brilliant company. She's fierce, rude, very funny and wrong about quite a lot, which she usually only admits afterwards. (She once gave away her jam roly-poly to be good, and she's still cross about it.)

Then the story switches to a diary. Fionnuala is eleven, Irish-American, and lives at the house with grandparents who insist on calling her Fiona. She's convinced the new evacuees are up to something. So you see the same few days from both sides, and each girl has the other completely wrong!

This one has real war in it. May sees streets of bombed houses and an unexploded bomb, and spends a night in the Underground while the raids go on overhead. Fionnuala's da has died and her mam mostly stays in bed. An uncle says cruel things about Irish people and foreigners. And May tells you in her very first report that she ends up solving a murder.

A child who's anxious about war or loss may find it a lot, even with May's jokes. If you've got a reader who loves an old-fashioned adventure but wants something with more bite, they'll be gripped.

What to read next

Hazel and her best friend Daisy Wells have their own mysteries as well. When your reader is a bit older, try Murder Most Unladylike, where the two of them set up a detective society at the very school May ran away from.