In Mac B. Kid Spy: Mac Undercover, a humorous children’s book illustrated by Mike Lowery, Mac Barnett tells the story of Mac Barnett who is a kid one minute and the next, a secret agent for the Queen of England.
Once he arrives in London, the Queen equips Mac with a secret identity kit and an alias so that he can go undercover to recover the queen’s spoon. As Hugh Anthony Cregg III, a piano tuner from Kalmazooo, Michigan, Mac travels from London to France and then to Russia on the trail of a thief.
In France, he meets the President, who also plays Spy Master on his game boy (a hand-held game console developed, manufactured, and marketed by Nintendo and popular in the 1980s) and has a high score of 4000—way lower than Mac’s. In Russia, Mac meets a KGB agent who has beaten the game Spy Master. On his adventure to retrieve the stolen goods, Mac shares various facts and frequently challenges the reader with the phrase, “You can look that up.”
The story is a light-hearted one sprinkled with tidbits of wisdom about pawns, power, plans, perseverance, and the seven primary points of the human body. It also shares the human desire for mystery, possessing the unknowable, and wanting what we cannot have.
- Posted by Donna