Alias Dragonfly – Review

The publisher sent me the download of this book after I requested it from netgalley.

The story (from the book page):

"Don't love a spy," warns fifteen-year-old Pinkerton agent Maddie Bradford, a lonely, rebellious outsider with a mind on fire and a photographic memory. It is 1861, the Civil War has just started and this motherless teen must move with her soldier-father from New Hampshire to Washington, DC-a city at war, packed cheek by jowl with soldiers, Rebel spies, slave catchers and traitors of all stripes bent on waging a war of destruction against the Union, and President Lincoln himself.
Maddie's journal, written in secret, of course, begins with her arrival at her aunt’s DC boardinghouse through the first year of the Civil War, a time, as Maddie puts it, full of "dips and dangers," when she becomes a fearless Union spy. And then there is the mysterious, maddening Jake Whitestone, a young man who awakens something equally dangerous in Maddie: Love in a time of terror.

Alias Dragonfly is well presented history, with an interesting fictional character to tie it all together. The battles and Washington City are shown in all their glamor and ugliness. The book is enhanced by Jane Singer's great history notes at the end.

And Maddie? Quite a neat hero. But the book lacked in pace. Maddie's spying adventures didn’t start until after two-thirds of the book. I really got tired of her "learning the trade" even though it was written well, and wanted a more specific story than Maddie’s trials on becoming a spy. Several story bits seemed thrown in, such as Nellie and Isaac. The well-portrayed "battle" at the end between Maddie and her doppelganger (who was only hinted briefly in the book's beginning) was poorly set up; except for a grabber for future Maddie episodes, this scene seemed fairly pointless.

Good history, good writing, slow story (And the cover doesn't look anything like the character--until the last bit of the novel when she finally does some spying).