Plot Summary
Stormbreaker is the first novel of Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker series featuring Alex Rider, teen spy. The novel begins with Alex learning of his guardian uncle's death in a car accident. Knowing his uncle's habits, Alex suspects that this death was no accident and seeks to find what really happened. Shortly into his investigation, Alex learns that his uncle was actually a famous spy who had been training him since childhood to follow in his footsteps. Though he is just a teenage boy, Alex is asked by the British government to take up his late uncle’s most recent mission, investigating the nefarious head of Sayles Enterprises who plans to give a fancy new computer, the Stormbreaker, to every child in England. Masquerading as a teen computer whiz who has gained access to Sayles Enterprises by winning a content, Alex is able to infiltrate Sayles enterprises and figure out what’s really going on. Within a few pages, the reader is swept along into the plot of this fast-moving spy thriller that features dozens of near death escapes, a tongue-less butler, and an enormous killer Portugese man-of-war.
Critical Evaluation
Readers who loathe endless pages of dialogue and description with close to no action should turn to the Alex Rider series. On just about every page, something drastic happens which makes it hard to put this book down. The drama of the novel demands a certain leap of the imagination--have you ever heard of a teenage spy? Or a fake “zit cream” that eats through metal? A high speed bicycle chase? Once the reader has let go of all attachments to the possible, action lovers will love Alex Rider, orphan boy genius who is called upon by the British government to essentially save the nation.
Reader’s Annotation
In the wake of his uncle’s death, fourteen year old Alex Rider learns that his uncle and guardian was not a bank official as he had thought but was actually a famous spy--and he also learns that he has been trained to be a spy since boyhood! Young James Bond fans--here is your man, Alex Rider.
Information about the Author
We learn about Anthony Horowitz’s remarkable childhood on the author’s website,
“Anthony Horowitz's life might have been copied from the pages of Charles Dickens or the Brothers Grimm. Born in 1956 in Stanmore, Middlesex, to a family of wealth and status, Anthony was raised by nannies, surrounded by servants and chauffeurs. His father, a wealthy businessman, was, says Mr. Horowitz, "a fixer for Harold Wilson." What that means exactly is unclear — "My father was a very secretive man," he says— so an aura of suspicion and mystery surrounds both the word and the man. As unlikely as it might seem, Anthony's father, threatened with bankruptcy, withdrew all of his money from Swiss bank accounts in Zurich and deposited it in another account under a false name and then promptly died. His mother searched unsuccessfully for years in attempt to find the money, but it was never found. That too shaped Anthony's view of things. Today he says, "I think the only thing to do with money is spend it." His mother, whom he adored, eccentrically gave him a human skull for his 13th birthday. His grandmother, another Dickensian character, was mean-spirited and malevolent, a destructive force in his life. She was, he says, "a truly evil person", his first and worst arch villain. "My sister and I danced on her grave when she died," he now recalls.
A miserably unhappy and overweight child, Anthony had nowhere to turn for solace. "Family meals," he recalls, "had calories running into the thousands…. I was an astoundingly large, round child…." At the age of eight he was sent off to boarding school, a standard practice of the times and class in which he was raised. While being away from home came as an enormous relief, the school itself, Orley Farm, was a grand guignol horror with a headmaster who flogged the boys till they bled. "Once the headmaster told me to stand up in assembly and in front of the whole school said, 'This boy is so stupid he will not be coming to Christmas games tomorrow.' I have never totally recovered." To relieve his misery and that of the other boys, he not unsurprisingly made up tales of astounding revenge and retribution.
So how did an unhappy boy, from a privileged background, metamorphose into the creator of Alex Rider, fourteen-year-old spy for Britain's MI6? Although his childhood permanently damaged him, it also gave him a gift — it provided him with rich source material for his writing career. He found solace in boyhood in the escapism of the James Bond films, he says. He claims that his two sons now watch the James Bond films with the same tremendous enjoyment he did at their age. Bond's glamour translates perfectly to the 14-year-old psyche, the author says. "Bond had his cocktails, the car and the clothes. Kids are just as picky. It's got to be the right Nike trainers (sneakers), the right skateboard. And I genuinely think that 14-year-olds are the coolest people on the planet. It's this wonderful, golden age, just on the cusp of manhood when everything seems possible."
Alex Rider is unwillingly recruited at the age of fourteen to spy for the British secret service, MI6. Forced into situations that most average adults would find terrifying and probably fatal, young Alex rarely loses his cool although at times he doubts his own courage. Using his intelligence and creativity, and aided by non-lethal gadgets dreamed up by MI6's delightfully eccentric, overweight and disheveled Smithers, Alex is able to extricate himself from situations when all seems completely lost. What is perhaps more terrifying than the deeply dangerous missions he finds himself engaged in, is the attitude of his handlers at MI6, who view the boy as nothing more than an expendable asset.
The highly successful Alex Rider novels include Stormbreaker, Point Blank, Skeleton Key, Eagle Strike, Scorpia, Ark Angel, Snakehead and most recently Crocodile Tears. And 2010 sees the Alex Rider series celebrate its 10 year anniversary!!!
Anthony Horowitz is perhaps the busiest writer in England. He has been writing since the age of eight, and professionally since the age of twenty. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he is also the writer and creator of award winning detective series Foyle’s War, and more recently event drama Collision, among his other television works he has written episodes for Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. Anthony became patron to East Anglia Children’s Hospices in 2009.”
Genre
Action/ Adventure
Curriculum Ties
N/A
Booktalking Ideas
Give some background on the author’s life and explain how that motivated him to create a character such as Alex Rider.
Reading Level
Ages 10+.
*This is a high/low book, one that I might recommend to older readers who are reading below grade level.
Challenge Issues
N/A
Why Included?
I wanted to include within my collection an action/ adventure novel and had heard that the Alex Rider Stormbreaker series was quite popular. While this is geared toward younger readers, I think that plenty of older readers (including myself!) can still enjoy them.
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