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Spy Runner Hardcover – February 12, 2019

by Eugene Yelchin (Author, Illustrator)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 45 ratings
Editors' pick Best Books Ages 9-12
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In Spy Runner, a noir mystery middle grade novel from Newbery Honor author Eugene Yelchin, a boy stumbles upon a secret that jeopardizes American national security.
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Previous page
  1. Reading age
    8 - 11 years
  2. Print length
    352 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Grade level
    Preschool - 1
  5. Lexile measure
    900L
  6. Dimensions
    5.7 x 1.25 x 8.7 inches
  7. Publisher
    Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
  8. Publication date
    February 12, 2019
  9. ISBN-10
    1250120810
  10. ISBN-13
    978-1250120816
  11. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Steeped in the paranoia and propaganda of the era, the noir tale draws parallels to the current political and social climate, nationalistic prejudices, and media-disseminated misinformation. . . Well-plotted and -paced, Yelchin’s thriller will be a favorite among readers who have an interest in history and intrigue." ―Publishers Weekly, starred review, on Spy Runner

"The action never stops, and readers will be gripped as the narrative thunders to a satisfying conclusion." ―Booklist on Spy Runner

"an escalating whirl of chases, crashes, threats, assaults, abductions, blazing gunplay, spies, and counterspies―along with revelations that hardly anyone, even Jake's mom, is what they seem." ―Kirkus Reviews, starred review, on Spy Runner

"Yelchin’s grainy black and white photo illustrations cast ominous shadows and will surely draw browsers into the text." ―The Bulletin on Spy Runner

About the Author

Eugene Yelchin is the author and illustrator of The Haunting of Falcon House, Arcady's Goal,and the Newbery Honor Book Breaking Stalin's Nose. He has also illustrated several books for children, including Crybaby, Who Ate All the Cookie Dough?, and Won Ton. He lives in California with his wife and children.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Henry Holt and Co. (BYR) (February 12, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250120810
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250120816
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 8 - 11 years
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 900L
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ Preschool - 1
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.06 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.7 x 1.25 x 8.7 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 45 ratings

About the author

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Eugene Yelchin

Eugene Yelchin

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Eugene Yelchin is a Russian-American artist best known as an illustrator and writer of books for children and young adults. Yelchin is a National Book Award finalist for The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge co-authored with M. T. Anderson and the recipient of Newbery Honor for Breaking Stalin’s Nose. He received Golden Kite Award for The Haunting of Falcon House, Crystal Kite Award for illustrating Won Ton, National Jewish Book Award for illustrating The Rooster Prince of Breslov, and SCBWI Tomie DePaola Award. Visit him at eugeneyelchinbooks.com

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
45 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A page-turner for middle graders
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2020
Verified Purchase
This is a great story, well-written, fast-paced, and thrilling; it will immediately engage the middle-grade reader. Also, it may well be an important book in that it stands up to the terrible falsehood fed our children that the United States is the evil force in the world.

We look forward to more books like it.
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Krista K
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommend
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2019
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My 10 year old loves this book and it’s hard to get him into books so that is saying a lot!!!! He’s got ocd and Tourette’s and adhd and a little autism and to keep him focused in one book is a task in its self , but this book has managed to keep him hooked!!! So I recommend
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stephenny
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommend by my son!
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2019
Verified Purchase
My 11yo read this in about a week and loved it. If your child likes historical fiction, give it a read!
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Kate Gonzalez
3.0 out of 5 stars Ridiculously, Unrealistically Violent...
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2019
Verified Purchase
I read this with my 8, almost 9, year old son, and while he was very into the story and enjoyed it, I found it a little disturbing at how much physical and mental abuse the 12-year old main character endures over the course of the book. Really, it’s over the top, and unrealistic. Every other chapter this little boy is being chased and run down by a car, beaten up, kidnapped, shot at, etc. ONE time would have been believable, but a dozen?? It was overkill. I wasn’t a fan, but giving it three stars since my son was.
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J. Dean
5.0 out of 5 stars Good book; my child enjoyed it
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2019
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My child enjoyed this book from his monthly book box
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Michael Robbins
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for kids who enjoy mysteries
Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2019
My almost 9 year old son loved this book. It starts a little slow but he was hooked after the plot gets moving. It made reading fun and when we finished it, he was hopeful there was more books in the series.
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Betsy Bird
5.0 out of 5 stars Truthiness
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2019
Don’t let it get around, but have you noticed that a lot of the middle grade fiction books out for kids this year (2019) are horrendously, incredibly, shockingly depressing? I mean, you get a bit of that every year, but 2019 appears to be shaping into something particularly dreary. There’s a running gag amongst my librarians that if you run across a novel for kids between the ages of 9-12 and at least one of the parents in the book isn’t dead, check the publication date because it probably came out last year. For the most part, the books I’ve encountered have dealt with grief. Grief and death and guilt and a smothering sense of helplessness in a cold, cruel world. What can we read into that? Well, the times in which we live aren’t exactly fodder for cheery fare, I’ll grant you. You’ve got ideologues pandering to humanity’s worst instincts, war, bloodshed, addiction, malaise, and worse and worse. I guess for a lot of authors of children’s books there’s a temptation to just sink into that feeling and draw from it. Ultimately those books find that tiny, gold, gleaming bit of hope in all that darkness. But if kids are anything like me, they’re going to get sick of that stuff pretty quickly. Here’s an idea: Why not take the idea of a world gone mad and give it a jolt of lightning to the veins? Set your book in another era when America went a little crazy, then liven things up with spies, car chases, murder attempts, gunshots, traitors, double agents, and that’s just the first few chapters! A book for the kids that want to read a response to our age that will thrill them to the core, and maybe plant a couple of seeds of rebellion in their craniums at the same time.

For Jake, life is simple. His father disappeared during WWII and the boy is fairly certain that means the man’s a P.O.W. with the Russians. Someday Jake will fly into that godless Communist country, find his father, and save him. In the meantime, it’s 1953 and the Cold War is in full swing. One day, Jake comes home to find that his mother has rented out the attic to a strange man named Shubin. A Russian man, no less. Convinced that Shubin is a Communist spy, Jake wastes no time in investigating the clear criminal. Unfortunately for him, the more Jake digs into the man’s life and dealings, the more dangerous things become for him. Is someone is tailing Jake all the time? Why is the FBI speaking to him during school hours? Is a man with gold teeth really staring through his bedroom window at night? And why, oh why did Jake steal those airplane plans out of Major Armbruster’s car? The more answers he receives the stranger things become, until Jake must face unspeakable truths about the country he loves and serves.

I was talking with a colleague the other day about what makes a children’s book memorable. Let’s say thirty years pass and you still remember the name and plot of a book written for kids. Why? What makes it stick in your brain? For me, a good children’s novel is one that isn’t afraid to get weird. “Harriet the Spy”? Chock full of really weird people and elements. “The Westing Game?” same story, only you set it in an apartment complex and you get to know the cast of characters better. And to this list I would add “Spy Runner”. It doesn’t start off weird, initially. When I thought it was just some safe little story about a boy coming to terms with McCarthyism I felt I’d heard this tune a couple times before. This is all “The Loud Silence of Francine Green” territory, right? But then I got to the scene when we first meet Jake’s new border, Shubin. Jake has come home to find his mom’s car precariously parked, one of her shoes still inside and the other one in the grass, the front door partly open and her purse on the doorstep. When he comes inside his mother is barefoot, laughing, bantering with a strange man as she angles a large trunk down the stairs with him. From that moment forward, this high tenor of weirdness imbues the text. Like Jake, you know something’s going on, but you aren’t sure what the nature of it is yet (though, as an adult reading a children’s book, you can probably guess).

Yelchin, born in Russia and who left the Soviet Union when he was twenty-seven, should not be read by new American-born children’s authors. Why? Well, if a man can live twenty-seven years in another country, then come to our own and, in the course of things, write better and more succinctly than so many of the Yanks I read in my daily work, that’s could be depressing to a debut writer. For me, there’s always one moment in a well-written book for kids that wins me over. Makes me fall in love with the book. In the case of “Spy Runner” it’s a different scene, a little later, between Jake, Shubin, and Jake’s mom. They’re in the living room and something is … off. Jake’s mom seems expectant. Jake is paused. Shubin isn’t doing what the mom wants or expects, and Jake has no expectations but he can feel this odd tension. It’s like watching a scene from a Eugene O’Neill production. Just the below the surface of the niceties, something strange is brewing. For Jake, and for the reader too, there’s an increasing sense that no one in his life is telling the truth and no one can be trusted. How many children’s novels, like this one, choose not to give their heroes confidants? Too few.

I’m also a sucker for a killer line. That sentence that turns all the ones before it on their heads. Listen to this: “Trudy Lamarre had beautiful red hair and eyes that made him stutter: deep, dark brown eyes. Jake despised her.” Or how about this description later of his mother. “He looked at her thin fingers, white from grasping the purse; at her small, delicate ear; at the side of her face; and at a thread of her hair the color of roasted chestnuts, shaped like a question mark hanging upside down.” Or even, quite possibly best of all, this moment when Jake accidentally discovers Shubin in his mother’s bedroom. The two of them, together, are trying to guide a moth out the window. It’s innocuous, but both Jake and the reader have the sense that they’ve just witnessed something incredibly tender pass between the two people. "He lifted his eyes to the ceiling, where their shadows swayed together as if dancing in time to the sound of the soft hollow tapping of the moth and of his heart beating hard against his rib cage and wanting to explode."

Of course, I guess the best evidence that Yelchin’s a good writer is the fact that he’s managed to write a whole book starring a protagonist that is very difficult to like. Jake, put plainly, is an idiot. A friend of mine remarked after reading this book that if adults ever wanted to, they could make a drinking game out of every time Jake nearly meets his demise (don’t try it – you’d be passed out before you got to Chapter Seven). But what you dislike about him is, to a certain extent, his surety that everything he’s been taught about America and Communism and spies, is true. It’s only when he begins to lose his grip on this certainty that you start to like him a little more. Before that, he’s just a dolt. Still, even an idiot can be sympathetic if he’s treated unjustly, and Jake gets a bit of that. You’re also rooting for him to either confront or escape the dark forces tailing him time and again. Even if you don’t wholly like him, you want him to win in the end.

When I was in high school my French class had us read a fairly simple novel over the course of several weeks. And the plot of this novel appeared to be perfectly calibrated to bore me, specifically, into a state of catatonic malaise. It was about thwarting spies who wanted to steal plans for military planes. SNORE! The degree to which I didn’t care about French teenagers solving crimes could only be matched by the degree to which I didn’t care about jet schematics. For this reason, I am going to grant Mr. Yelchin some extra points for actually making a reader care about this sort of thing. I mentioned earlier that the book is exciting, sometimes shockingly so. Though there isn’t anything in the least bit supernatural about it, you still get this otherworldly feeling when strange, exciting things start happening. About the time Jake spits out a tooth from a fall, you’re all in.

I would be amiss if I didn’t mention Yelchin’s photography. Yelchin has mentioned that film noir has had a bit of an impact on the writing of this book, and indeed he holds a graduate film degree himself. But the photographs that grace the text don’t resemble film stills (though they rely on many of the tropes, particularly “The Third Man”) so much as they do photographs taken on the sly. I once saw, and very much enjoyed, a Bill Morrison film called “Decasia” constructed entirely from film footage that had deteriorated over time. The photographs in this book feel akin to that movie. Where Yelchin chooses to blur, to deteriorate, to stress, or to wear down is carefully considered. The end result is that even the most innocuous image, like that of a marching band coming down a street, feels vaguely nightmarish. The innocent and everyday are rendered untrustworthy through Yelchin’s gloss. But they are also, and I mean this truly, beautiful, wonderful photographs. You could hang them on a gallery wall and no one would so much as blink. When Yelchin illustrated M.T. Anderson’s “The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge”, it was the first time I’d encountered an unreliable visual narrator. When I look at the photographs in “Spy Runner” it is no longer a question of reliable and unreliable. It is literally a question of whose lens you’re looking through.

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about how one of the many roles librarians can choose to fulfill is to act as educators to children and patrons about truth and facts. If we can teach people that not everything they read on the internet is true and comes from a reliable source, we’ll be doing a public service. At one point early in the novel Jake’s teacher mentions that you can’t believe everything you hear on the radio, a statement that shocks the boy considerably. Already, the children of the early 21st century are, like Jake, learning that they must be canny, be clever, and question everything. Complacency can be put aside when you start to get a glimpse of what you’re up against. For these kids, they’ll want a book that’s unafraid to talk about the price of truth in a world that relies on understood lies. Yelchin isn’t mapping the era of McCarthyism on our current times. He’s holding it up to the mirror of where we are now, showing us the similarities between the eras, and asking what we’re going to do about it. More of this, please, Mr. Yelchin. More of this, please.

For ages 10-14.
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