Secret Agent - Hardcover

Robyn Freedman Spizman is an award-winning author and a nationally known media personality and consumer advocate. She has appeared for the past two decades on television and radio, and is considered a leading product-and-gift expert. To learn more about her go to www.robynsipizman.com. Robyn lives with her husband in Atlanta, Georgia, and they have two children, Justin and Ali. Secret Agent is her middle-grade fiction debut.

Mark Johnston teaches English in Greenville, South Carolina, where he lives with his wife. Secret Agent is his first novel.

Grade 7-10–Kyle, a New York City high school freshman, is willing to do almost anything to keep his parents together. Convinced that their separation is due simply to his father's obsession with a book he has written, the boy enlists an oddball collection of friends as "secret agents" to help get Dad's senior romance published. The vast array of semi-developed characters includes a flamboyant yet seclusive writer whom no one knows is really a famous "female" author, a dead but influential editor, an unexpectedly wonderful old bookseller who "adopts" Kyle's dad, a classy senior editor whom the kids need to impress, and a bevy of buddies. Through Kyle's persistence and increasing ability to perceive connections and utilize them, the teens manage to lift the manuscript from Dad's hiding place, start a "buzz" throughout New York's publishing industry about the fabulous writer "everybody's" talking about, but no one can find–and secret the manuscript to the senior editor in a ruse involving a "recommendation" from her deceased mentor. Though the journey is circuitous, the characters excessive, and the narrative unsettling (the story is told by an omniscient observer who is afflicted with a severe case of teen speak), it becomes a strangely compelling adventure in which readers root for Kyle's success.–Mary R. Hofmann, Rivera Middle School, Merced, CA