I abolutely LOVED this book SO 100x SO much!

1st of all the story was amazing and great!

2nd of all: WOW! Just wow! This book was so good and I would read it a thousand hundred million times more!

3rd of all: I defeintly reccomend this bokt o anyone who likes a good spy story with freinds/sidekicks and MUCH more.

The only thing that was a little meh was the big words and sophisticated beggening of the story.

this is sad but good if you like adventures

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (?)

I was unaware of the existence of these books till a week ago when I went to reread the original after rereading The Long Secret. Shocked to realize I didn’t have it among my small collection of favorite books from my childhood, I promptly got it from the library.
After reading the reviews, my expectations were quite low. What sort of ghastly modern spin would this new writer put on a setting far removed in time, not to mention “relatable social class”?
In my day, a significant portion of young reader books were set in amongst upper-middle class New Yorkers.
I was pleasantly charmed to find that the setting was the same without being too anachronistic. Harriet’s family had simply been bumped up a class level or two in order to justify a household replete with cook, maid and governess. Although, Ole Golly was never called that!
I felt the author captured Harriet’s voice quite well, although her character made a number of choices I don’t believe she would have made.
The storyline was adequate in both books, although I deeply question the wisdom of introducing Annie Smith as a character at all. She overshadowed Harriet’s own character and turned Harriet into something of a follower, which was unpleasant to watch. This led to the almost total exclusion of Janie from these two books, something I found utterly unrealistic and puzzling! Why? Why exclude Janie? Interactions between Janie and Annie would have been hilarious.
Sport, however, made plenty of appearances.
There was a problem with the timeline involving Sport, as well. The book Sport took place the year after Harriet The Spy, in which he started his new school. The Long Secret would have been the summer in between. In Harriet Spies Again, the author has Sport entering the new school. But she references events from it in Harriet Double Agent.
I don’t like that. Don’t do that.
I did, however, enjoy a further fleshing out of Harriet’s parents and her relationship with them.
I had long felt there was a disconnect in how they were portrayed in the original book and in The Long Secret. They barely feature as distracted socialites flummoxed by their odd child in the original, but conventionally affectionate and involved in The Long Secret. These books bridge that gap quite nicely. I come from a similar background and recognize that parents with an active social life will, by necessity, relegate family life to weirdly formalized snippets of time but this changes when on vacations.
The plots of both books unnecessarily revolved around “a mystery”. This felt forced and did not adequately drive the “action”, as it were.
The point of the original was not what happened but Harriet’s interior growth. They were all quite subtle books.
Despite my comments, I quite enjoyed these and feel the author did a pretty good job, given the daunting task of writing sequels to another writers famous and beloved books! That’s an incredible amount of pressure!

I enjoyed reading this sequel!

Cute reimagining of a favorite childhood character

This one was as good as the others!

She again keeps the easy reading fun! Good to see she has a new friend and reunites with another.

This is the second in the reboots of Harriet The Spy, after Harriet Spies Again. I would definitely recommend reading Harriet the Spy first (obviously) but I would also recommend reading Spies Again, as some things in this book won't make sense otherwise.

This is also shorter than Spies Again, so it does finish quite abruptly. Despite being published in 2007, there have been no further spin offs or follow ups to this and Spies Again, which is quite disappointing. Perhaps the sales were not what they'd hoped for. They are good, but as I mentioned in my Spies Again review, I don't think they quite captured the magic (or the verging on fanatical note taking.)

This also starts to show the characters growing up, which was previously touched upon in Spies Again (for reference, I have not read The Long Secret as yet, and i know that deals with more puberty issues) with Sport growing hair. His voice is mentioned by Harriet as changing and even Janie reappears in this book. Her character has been completely changed, from the wanting-to-blow-up-the-world-science-crazy-girl, to a popstar obsessed tweenager. I do think Janie was a sadly forgotten about character in the previous book, and I don't particularly like the severe change of her personality and her attitude towards Harriet at times. However, Sport is still floating around, but Harriet is experiencing the changes of her peers, and wondering/fearing if the same will happen to her.

I have found that Spies Again and Double Agent do tend the miss the most important point of what made the original book so popular - Harriet spends less and less time writing in her notebooks, and even less time spying on her regulars. (Although she does tend to unlock the "toy box" that they're kept in and stroke the spines/re-read some of them.) I miss the stories of her adventures in the dumbwaiter and sneaking up on people, to snatch part of their lives/conversations to include in her notebooks. She does still write in her notebook in this, but it was too few and far between for my liking.

Ole Golly is also sadly missing from this, apart from a couple of letters sent from Montreal, and Cook is also missing from the majority of the book. These were big characters in the original book and Spies Again, I just felt like Double Agent could have been longer, or spent less time on Annie.

Most of the book is taken up of the mystery of Annie/Yolanda/Rosarita/Zoe/Cassandra and who she's sneaking off to see. It is good that the authors of these spin off books feel confident to introduce new characters into Harriet's world, but Annie annoyed me a little bit, and just rubbed me (and Harriet) up the wrong way. If I had been Harriet, I would have gone back to Sport in a heartbeat.

There's also a slight will-they-won't-they between Harriet and Sport, again, showing the passage of time, and how they're starting to develop feelings. Not much is made of it though, and I'm not sure if Louise Fitzhugh would be spinning in her grave at this thought or not.

It will be interesting to see how The Long Secret compares to these spin offs, especially as that was a direct sequel by Fitzhugh. As much as I grew up loving Harriet The Spy, I just don't feel like the spark is there for these two books. Bring back the notebooks!​

This book was super cute. It is about Harriet the Spy, and the new girl Annie who moves in across the street with her Aunt and Uncle and starts at Harriet's school mid-year.

Being the spy that Harriet is, she follows Annie around to try to figure out why Annie is staying with her Aunt and Uncle.

Annie goes and visits with an older gentleman and Harriet isn't sure who he is and knows that Annie is too young to have a boyfriend but isn't sure what to think.

Annie finds out that Harriet is spying on her and gets mad and won't tell her what is going on. Harriet gets scared and thinks that Annie is getting kidnapped when Annie goes off with the older gentleman so she tells Annie's Aunt and Uncle who call the police.

As it turns out, Annie was seeing her father. Annie wasn't supposed to see her father until her parent's divorce was finalized which is why she was currently living with her Aunt and Uncle.

Harriet got humbled and found out the hard way that not everything is what it looks like in the end.