Discovering Fun in The Secrets of Lovelace Academy

If the end result of a bait and switch is fun or beneficial, does it really matter? That depends on how strict you want to stick to your initial interpretation of the subject matter. Did you mis-judge it based on its cover or did it change its trajectory during the course of the story? I don’t even remember what I thought The Secrets of Lovelace Academy would be about. However, by the third chapter I didn’t care, and was fully engrossed in the story of a teenage orphan girl who was living in group home.  If you’re like me; you need to read mglit about an orphanage at the turn of a century, as much as you need to spill coffee on the essays that you need to grade. That’s not bloody likely, is it?

In the case of The Secrets of Lovelace Academy, it’s the details, charm and wit in this young skewing mglit historical fiction will have you hooked in. Lainey Phillips is out titular character, a young tween who has lived at the Sycamore Home for Orphaned Children (SHOC) since she was three. It’s nine years later and whatever comforting veneer of the orphanage has worn off. She’s realized that the couple who run the place are corrupt and spend a disproportionate amount of the donations on themselves. Most of the kids at SHOC are thieving jerks who only want to get her in trouble and she’s only got one true friend at the facility.

This starts to turn on the day of the facility’s open house. Lainey is in the garden, just goofing around and doing simple experiments with gravity, when one of the donors strikes up a conversation with her. The two have a quick chat about the rate at which objects are pulled to the ground. This is unusual because few girls her age are able to read, much less grasp the concept (at the time) of gravitational pull. It was a good conversation and a glimpse of how Lainey would like to spend her days.

The next day she’s summoned to the headmaster’s office where she’s certain that she’s about to be kicked out of the house. However, much like Maverick in Top Gun, she get’s called up to go to another school. That lady runs a STEM school in London and wants her to go there. Lainey jumps at the chance, but quickly finds out that the same jerks that were at SHOC are also present at the new school.

She gets in trouble very quickly at school. At the same time, however, she’s shown something that might save her bacon from being expelled at this smarter, cleaner and better school. Lainey finds out about a lady scientist who might need help in Bern, which is far away and needs to be reached by train. Sensing that this is the only to remain at school, she runs away from what was thought to be her saving grace in an attempt to do a much more difficult task.

The above plot synopsis takes place in the first 40% of the book. The remaining 60% has her meeting up with some other youth, in a ‘lost boys’ type of vibe where they need to work together in order to help each other. Lainey has to truthfully ingrain herself to this lady scientist and her family. This scientist is on the cusp of a landmark discovery, and Lainey wants to help her so that women scientists can get the recognition they deserve.

Ah-I knew it, The Secrets of the Lovelace Academy is a message book! It’s not, calm down. It’s a good book, with a very patient, adventure-driven story that lives somewhere between realistic and historical fiction. The ‘scientist’ is Mileva Maric, the wife of Albert Einstein and the time period for the book is 1905. That was the year that he published Annus Mirabilis, a paper that discussed things far beyond my pay grade and required online research just to confirm that the incidents in the book actually happened in real life. They did, well, the creation of the papers did. The fact that a 13 year-old girl helped Mileva take care of their child, so that she and Albert could team up, complete them, and allow for a woman to get credited on a major discovery are slightly embellished.

But, who cares? I wouldn’t have read a book whose synopsis was about a teen girl who runs away from school to help care for the child of two well-respected scientists in 1905. The secrets in The Secrets of Lovelace Academy lead your mind to wander about magical creatures in the ground floor or mystical wizards who are plotting world domination. Instead, the secret that mglit readers will discover is much simpler, it’s reading can be fun. It can take you away to places you didn’t think you wanted to go to. It’ll show you stories you didn’t think you cared about or wanted to hear.

The Secrets of Lovelace Academy is by New York Times Bestselling author Marie Benedict & Courtney Sheinmel and is available on Aladdin, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

There are affiliate links in this post.