The Year of Secret Assignments, by Jaclyn Moriarty

Book Review by Devin
Grade 8 English
Bigelow Middle School, MA

Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Year of Secret Assignments was an enjoyable and exciting read. Cassie, Emily, and Lydia are three best friends at the snooty Ashbury High School. Their over-enthusiastic English teacher, Mr. Botherit, has his students take part of the Ashbury-Brookfield Pen Pal Project. A Project where each student is assigned to write to another student at the criminal-frilled Brookfield high. The threesome are assigned Charles, Sebastian, and Matthew. The letters soon lead to lock picking, alarm pulling, and a Year of Secret Assignments.

The Year of Secret Assignments, A Novel Approach

The entire story is told through letters, e-mails, diary entries, pretend court transcripts, notes, and Your Notebook™ entries. The creative way that Jaclyn Moriarty tells the story is both entertaining and frustrating at the same time. The characters, plot and setting unravel in a way that the reader can understand easily, but the time at which events happen and letters are sent are not very clear. Each chapter shows the letters exchanged between one of the girls and one of the boys. This makes it so that when you reach the next chapter you have to reset your mind back to the beginning of the previous chapter and match up the time and events. This isn’t too hard to follow, but required paying a lot of attention to detail.

This book most likely would fall under the category of Comedy or Romance. It has its humorous parts and it’s Romantic ones, but overall it’s a great book. I felt that the characters were the perfect mix of personalities, which leave you relating with a part of each character.

It took me a while to realize that the book was set in Australia, but I managed to catch on not too late. Moriarty hinted at Australia through the mentioning of a Kookaburra and Eucalyptus trees. The setting wasn’t described much, but it wouldn’t have made much of a difference anyways. Each of the characters’ letters used humor to give them a more casual feeling, except for Cassie and Mathew’s. Their letters are more tense and serious than I think they needed to be.

My favorite character was Lydia, because her sense of humor is very much like mine. She’s random in the way I like being, that makes people laugh, but sometimes they don’t know if you’re serious or not. “Dear Person at Brookfield, I am a fish. You wouldn’t think so to look at me, what with my uniform and the hair on top of my head and all that. But it’s true. I am a fish.” this is an excerpt from the first letter Lydia writes to Sebastian.

The Year of Secret Assignments, The Verdict

Anyone who has taken the time and energy to read this review, thank you, and I hope you read The Year of Secret Assignments and love it as much as I did!

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