Spying On Miss Müller is about a girl named Jessie Drumm living during WWII. It was written by Eve Bunting and its genre is historical fiction.
This book takes place at the Alveara boarding school in Belfast, Ireland. Jessie Drumm attends there, and is in the dorm Snow White. One of the teachers at the school is Miss Müller, a half-German that is also the head of Snow White. Jessie and her dorm friends decide to start spying on Miss Müller, because they think she might be a spy for the Germans. So one night, Jessie has to go to the bathroom. When she finishes, she spots Miss Müller, and decides to follow her. Jessie follows her all the way up to the forbidden area that leads to the roof, then has to go back because she needs to turn on her flashlight to go any further. Later that night, there is an air raid against Belfast by the Germans, and the whole school has to go to the bomb shelter. Miss Müller turns out to be missing, but when she is found, claims to have gone to get the deaf caretaker that couldn’t hear the alarm. Jessie is right near when this happens, and figures out that Miss Müller couldn’t have gone to get the caretaker, because her slippers weren’t muddy, and to get to the caretakers room, you need to go through a huge muddy ditch. She then starts to suspect that Miss Müller signaled the attack, because it was the same night she went to the roof.
When the air raid stops, the lights go out, and Jessie gets her first kiss by her crush, Ian McManus. Right after, the lights get turned back on, and they head back to the dorms. The nurse stops Jessie, because she has weak intestines, and wants to see her in the morning. The next morning after breakfast, Jessie hurries to the nurses because there is going to be an assembly that she doesn’t want to miss. There are two younger boarders in front of her in line that tell her about a picture of Miss Müller’s Nazi father that’s hidden behind another picture in her room. Then Jessie decides to go up to the forbidden area and to the roof to see if she can find any signs that Miss Müller was there. She doesn’t find any, but gets her blouse soaked for the rain after being on the roof. She then has to go and change her wet blouse. Jessie, to see if the younger boarders were telling the truth, sneaks into Miss Müller’s room after she changes, and finds the picture. After this, she heads to the assembly, but arrives too late and has to wait outside. Greta Ludowski, who is a Jew that escaped from Poland, is also outside, and Jessie recruits her on the spying team. The school starts becoming incredibly mean to Miss Müller, and starts hissing whenever she’s near. The spying team also starts taking turns keeping watch.
One night, Jessie gets called to Old Rose, the strict principal. She then learns that her favorite cousin Bryan has been taken prisoner by the Germans, and gets told this by her drunken father. This is heartbreaking to her. A couple nights later, Jessie is on watch, and finds Miss Müller going out of her room. She gathers everyone in the dorm and they follow her. Greta, who is not in Snow White, was not at her post in the hallway, and she had every intention to harm Miss Müller. When they get to the roof, they find Greta, and she tells them that Miss Muller goes down the fire escape on the side of the building to get to whatever she’s doing. From there Miss Müller could have gone anywhere. When they start to head back, they pass a room that is usually padlocked shut. It gaped open instead. Miss Muller and another teacher, Mr. Bolton, were inside. It turns out that Miss Müller wasn’t a spy or for the Germans. Mr. Bolton was there to help her through this tough time, and he liked her. Even though she was such a nice teacher, she was fired two days later because Greta told.
I thought this book was only okay. It wasn’t very interesting, and I never could really get into it. A couple of times, though, there was some suspense because of the author’s way of getting into Jessie’s thoughts and fears. A few examples of this would be when she was called to see the strict principal and thought she was in trouble, and when you didn’t know if she was going to be caught sneaking around the school. Another good attribute about the book would be when I felt sad for Miss Müller when she had to leave because of the girls’ prejudice against her. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this book to someone my age, but maybe to someone younger because it was an easy read and wasn’t extremely boring.