This afternoon it's my turn on the the Agent Asha blog tour and I'm very excited to tell you all about this wonderful book.
Asha Joshi is a girl with a love of technology and coding. She spends her time inventing things and has even hacked into her teacher's emails and it's this that leads her to being recruited by the CSA (Children's Spy Agency), who send her on her first mission to help save the world from a failing internet due to sharks who are destroying cables. Her mission means that she needs to infiltrate and hack the offices of Shelly Inc, run by trillionaire inventor Shelly Belly who is suspected of training the sharks to cut the cables so everybody will subscribe to her new internet. Can Asha, her coding know-how and her gadgets succeed before everyone succumbs to Shelly Belly's devious ways?
'A mole's bottom is a dark place to be. A duck's bottom is a wet one and a hippo's bottom is a dangerous one.'
From the very first page, this is a book that grabs your attention (who wouldn't want to read on after that?!), and is a fast-paced novel full of exciting adventure and with a brilliant role-model as the main character. Asha is a strong and determined girl whose love of coding and inventing shine through at every stage of the book, and I'm thrilled to have such a different character to be able to introduce to the children at school. Asha's side-kicks are also brilliantly different too: Tumble is a hamster-like toy that Asha invented when she was only 6 years old, and Drone is a nannybot that has been with Asha all her life - supposed to be there to look after Asha, her parents are unaware that she's been hacking Drone for years in order to get round the parental controls! Both are quirky characters in their own right who enhance the story even further.
Coding is woven into every section of the story, using coding that is taught in school and, throughout the book, pages of coding, fact-files, case files and illustrations all make for an interactive experience, helping the reader feel even more part of the adventure (hats off to Anjan Sarkar for her work on the illustrations). 
The combination of coding, tips on having secure passwords and information on how to spot fake news all go to make this a relevant read as well as a thrilling adventure.
What's not to love about this book? Female spy, strong characters, STEM, action and adventure...This is a new type of secret agent novel with so much more to it and I guarantee that children (and adults) will love it! I can't wait to be able to share it with the children in my school and am already looking forward to reading the next in the series.
As part of the blog tour, we were asked to think of our own secret agent gadgets (we see Asha using the what-a-bottle and the mega fart selfie stick) so I asked the Year 6 currently in school what they would create and here's some of the inventions they came up with:
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