An Unlikely Spy

 Rebecca Starford has written a different kind of spy novel in An Unlikely Spy.  

In this novel, the protagonist is a young girl looking for acceptance and trying to leave the family and lifestyle she finds embarrassing and become apart of the world she aspires to.  Evelyn Varley grows up in a middle class working English family.  She wins a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school and sets off to change her life.  She does not share her personal life with the girls at school.  Then she befriends Sally and her cousin Julie who are from the kind of world she wishes to inhabit.  

Sally and Julie become her life long friends.  Sally's father Hugh has well placed friends and finds Evelyn a job with MI5 as the war in Europe is beginning.  Evelyn becomes a spy and is working for the War office infiltrating the group known as The Lion Society, “. . . a group of fascist sympathizers, mostly renegades from the Establishment.  Their plans and ideals test Evelyn and her loyalties.

In the end can a spy really have friends or is everything just an illusion ?  What does a person give up or find a challenge to their real personal beliefs ?  This is an interesting book with some twists and turns .  Though it is not really what this reader would call a spy thriller, more of a novel of friendship, loyalties, family acceptance and love.