What is Matt Killeen reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Matt Killeen, author of Orphan Monster Spy.

His entry begins:

I’m in the midst of research for the sequel to Orphan Monster Spy so that’s eating up all my reading time, not that I’m the best reader – a hangover from a childhood when I was the youngest and poorest reader of my brothers, a great example of why you shouldn’t shame children over their reading abilities or choices.

Recent loves include The Heartbeats of Wing Jones by Katherine Webber, The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James and Annabel Pitcher’s The Last Days of Archie Maxwell. Wing Jones is a magical-realist take on racial identity, the fragile nature of popularity and the sports novel. The Loneliest Girl is a teen Silent Running with online grooming / abuse. Archie Maxwell is a coming out story that deals with toxic masculinity. I had to read these for an author panel I was on, and I’m...[read on]

About Orphan Monster Spy, from the publisher:

Her name is Sarah. She’s blonde, blue-eyed, and Jewish in 1939 Germany. And her act of resistance is about to change the world.

After her mother is shot at a checkpoint, fifteen-year-old Sarah meets a mysterious man with an ambiguous accent, a suspiciously bare apartment, and a lockbox full of weapons. He’s part of the secret resistance against the Third Reich, and he needs Sarah to hide in plain sight at a school for the daughters of top Nazi brass, posing as one of them. If she can befriend the daughter of a key scientist and get invited to her house, she might be able to steal the blueprints to a bomb that could destroy the cities of Western Europe. Nothing could prepare Sarah for her cutthroat schoolmates, and soon she finds herself in a battle for survival unlike any she’d ever imagined. But anyone who underestimates this innocent-seeming girl does so at their peril. She may look sweet, but she’s the Nazis’ worst nightmare.

Orphan Monster Spy is on Jenny Kawecki's list of seven YA titles with undercover spies.

Follow Matt Killeen on Twitter.

Writers Read: Matt Killeen.

--Marshal Zeringue