It's
Marvelous Middle Grade Monday
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and #IMWAYR day
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April 28, 2026 by Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
If you have avid readers of World War II narrative nonfiction, this is the book they need! It's a cross between Seiple's Nazi Saboteurs: Hitler's Secret Attack on America and Janeczko's Secret Soldiers: How the U.S. Twenty-Third Special Troops Fooled the Nazis (both published in 2019), but centers on Operation Bodyguard and several of the double agents that were instrumental in making it a success. Starting with a list of the many historical figures involved, Barone draws us in to the world of espionage and intrigue that existed during this time period. The thing that baffled me was how some of these agents were able to be hired by the government with absolutely no skills or background at all in intelligence work!
Two of these people, Johnny Jebsen and Duško Popov, were wealthy and looking for adventure. Juan Pujol Garcia was a poultry farmer who had a lot of trouble being accepted, and only got taken on when his wife approached the US with his "credentials". Perhaps my favorite is Lily Sergueiew, who was Russian, and was recruited by the Abwehr. She wanted to be sent to Britain so that she could be a double agent, but really wanted to take her small dog, Babs, with her. She was promised that she could, but this didn't work out, and she harbored a lot of ill will against the British when she had to leave the dog behind.
I'm not sure how it occurs to someone that it's a good idea to be a "XX agent" (double cross; this tripped me up when I read it!). The stakes are high, and the amount of lying one would have to keep straight would be enormous. Since the British had managed to crack the codes developed by the German Enigma machine, but the Germans didn't know this, there was a lot of work involving codes.
Operation Bodyguard was essentially a plan to distract the Germans from fortifying the area around Normandy ahead of the planned Allied D Day operation. The planning surrounding this was enormous. Not only were there the messages and misleading information passed by the double agents, but a vast infrastructure of fake harbors and equipment. I'd read about the soldiers parachuting into areas with gramophones and records of gunfire and talking, but even with the pictures in the book and Barone's excellent descriptions, it's hard to imagine how vast the operation was.
Of course, D Day was as successful as something that contributed to the death of so many men could be. The Nazis were turned back, and the war changed. What was interesting was how the double agents were involved, and what happened to them afterwards. Again, I was fascinated with Sergueiew. There are excerpts from her journal (which things like a horrible thing for a double agent to keep!), and she was so bitter and disenchanted with the whole experience, but kept going more or less out of spite, and because she enjoyed having the power to take down the whole operation.
While WWII is not my favorite thing to read about, (and I struggled mightily to keep all of the moving pieces of this narrative straight!) there are always students who want more information. Double Crossed is a great length, has plenty of pictures and facsimiles of things like the initial plan for Project Bodyguard, and ends with resources for additional reading. The teachers at my school are requiring that students read more narrative nonfiction, so this is a perfect book to purchase for a middle school or high school collection, along with Barone's other titles like Race to the Bottom of the Earth: Surviving Antarctica, Unbreakable: The Spies Who Cracked the Nazis' Secret Code, and Mountain of Fire: The Eruption and Survivors of Mount St. Helens. Of course, what I am really looking forward to is her Mind Not the Timid, a fictional book about the women's suffrage movement in 1917, set to potentially come out in 2027!
Classey, Paige. Anna-Jane and the Infinite SummerE ARC provided by Netgalley
April 28, 2026 by Random House Books for Young Readers
**Spoilers**
In this novel in verse, Anna-Jane, who has just finished 7th grade, is excited to return to Camp Chester to be with her friend Amaya. She will miss her mother, who works as a waitress and saves up all year in order to send her to camp, and even then relies on a scholarship. Anna-Jane has brought several books with her and is keeping a journal on the advice of her language arts teacher, Ms. Zhang, who encourages her to write. Camp starts out fairly normally, with a helpful but reserved counselor, Bridget, and a cabin full of girls, including the shy Morgan. Anna-Jane is worried when she sees Bryce, who just graduated from her middle school, because she is afraid that he will tell people that she is poor. She also thinks he is rather cute. When the cabin is allowed to go to town for pizza and a movie, they realize that something is wrong. They only see four people in town, and they have spotty cell service. Anna-Jane does hear from her mother, but only a cryptic text that something is wrong and her mother is coming to get her. Back at the camp, the girls eavesdrop on the counselors, and know that something has taken out all of the internet, phone, and cable service, and people are ill. Some parents show up to retrieve their children, but Anna-Jane's mother never comes. Hayes, the director, tries to establish control, which the counselors like Rob don't like, and Nurse Collins tries to let the children know what is going on, and also takes good care of them. When a little boy, Thomas, is found in the woods, more details about the problem emerge. There is a sickness, and his parents left him alone while they went to the hospital. There is talk that it's an act of bioterrorism that has infected the food. As the summer drags on, the campers are put to work, and all supplies must be pooled. Morgan starts trying to determine what is wrong with the spiders around the camp; there's already been a dead, mutated wolf that the children found. Some counselors leave, and Anna-Jane has a falling out with Amara when she spends time with the charismatic Pooja. The children start hunting and fishing, but try to hold on to a routine schedule of camp activities. Things get worse when Thomas becomes ill and dies, and Rob talks about leaving camp and taking children with him. Bryce's sister Zoe, who is Rob's girlfriend, manages to talk him in to leaving with just her. Morgan thinks she has some insight into why the campers haven't gotten sick, but Nurse Collins collapses and sinks into a diabetic coma. Since Hayes has already abandoned the campers, things become even more dire. Luckily, Zoe shows up to let the children know that while most of the people in the US have died and things are not looking good for their relatives, there are people who have survived, and they are banding together. Amaya chooses to remain at the camp, but Anna-Jane goes with Zoe, Bryce, and Pooja with the team of survivors.
Strengths: I loved the premise of this and could totally see the 7th grade me constructing a rich fantasy of me leading all of the campers at Camp Kiwatani as we survived with Nurse Collins as the only adult. Anna-Jane and I would have made short work of the idiots Rob and Cody. One of the best parts of this was the sweet romance with Bryce; if the world is ending, a tween romance would definitely make things a little better. Bioterrorism and the concomitant disabling of the communication infrastructure would definitely be my top two ways that a dystopia would actually roll out. It makes sense that a camp would have decent food stores, and taking supplies from Thomas' neighborhood enables the group to survive without too much difficulty. There's just enough tween drama to make this realistic. Having read this, I'm a little surprise there aren't more surival type stories that start at summer camp and continue When Things Go Wrong.
Weaknesses: At the beginning of the pandemic, my daughters, who both read their fair share of dystopian titles, made the observation that they thought living in a dystopian world would involve a lot more running around setting cars on fire. The bioterrorist act was absolutely devastating, but the children in the camp were largely spared. Food was somewhat scarce, they had no winter clothing, and they were on alert for the camp to be attacked, but aside from some interpersonal conflicts, nothing exciting happened. The ending was bleak.
What I really think: The cover and title, combined with the fact that this is a novel in verse, might make this a book that needs to be hand sold. The description of the book tours it as "an ode to books, friendship, and the power of women". It's somewhat along the lines of Nelson's The Girl Who Owned a City and O'Brien's Z for Zachariah, but not as action packed as Walter's Rule of Three, Smith's The Switch, Freeman's Zap, or Philbrick's The Big Dark. Like Lettrick's camp-based Frenzy, the ending is fairly dire. The most mentioned comparison is Freeman's Alone, and that is pretty accurate.
Strengths: I loved the premise of this and could totally see the 7th grade me constructing a rich fantasy of me leading all of the campers at Camp Kiwatani as we survived with Nurse Collins as the only adult. Anna-Jane and I would have made short work of the idiots Rob and Cody. One of the best parts of this was the sweet romance with Bryce; if the world is ending, a tween romance would definitely make things a little better. Bioterrorism and the concomitant disabling of the communication infrastructure would definitely be my top two ways that a dystopia would actually roll out. It makes sense that a camp would have decent food stores, and taking supplies from Thomas' neighborhood enables the group to survive without too much difficulty. There's just enough tween drama to make this realistic. Having read this, I'm a little surprise there aren't more surival type stories that start at summer camp and continue When Things Go Wrong.
Weaknesses: At the beginning of the pandemic, my daughters, who both read their fair share of dystopian titles, made the observation that they thought living in a dystopian world would involve a lot more running around setting cars on fire. The bioterrorist act was absolutely devastating, but the children in the camp were largely spared. Food was somewhat scarce, they had no winter clothing, and they were on alert for the camp to be attacked, but aside from some interpersonal conflicts, nothing exciting happened. The ending was bleak.
What I really think: The cover and title, combined with the fact that this is a novel in verse, might make this a book that needs to be hand sold. The description of the book tours it as "an ode to books, friendship, and the power of women". It's somewhat along the lines of Nelson's The Girl Who Owned a City and O'Brien's Z for Zachariah, but not as action packed as Walter's Rule of Three, Smith's The Switch, Freeman's Zap, or Philbrick's The Big Dark. Like Lettrick's camp-based Frenzy, the ending is fairly dire. The most mentioned comparison is Freeman's Alone, and that is pretty accurate.
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