Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies by Alison D Stegert

Title: Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies

Author: Alison D Stegert

Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery

Publisher: Chicken House

Published: 1^st May 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 384

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: At her dull Victorian finishing school, fourteen-year-old Winnie dreams of becoming a top inventor like her father. Then, she’s recruited into a league of young ladies guarding Her Majesty the Queen. Soon, Winnie is not only serving royalty but learning what she needs to save her papa.  

Winifred Weatherby is no ordinary nineteenth-century girl. She’s unconventional, plucky, and smart. In fact, she’s a girl-genius inventor on a mission to become an engineer, despite the fact that engineering is a Men-Only Zone in 1889.

After being expelled from her progressive academy for promising young ladies, the incorrigible Winifred Weatherby is secretly recruited to be a gadget inventress for Queen Victoria’s league of young lady spies. While aiming to exhibit her Very Promising Invention at the 1889 Paris World Fair, Winnie must protect Queen Victoria from would-be plotters, find her missing father, and prove to the world that girls CAN be inventors and engineers.

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Welcome to 1889, the height of Queen Victoria’s reign, and the year of \World Fair in Paris, where Winnie hopes to show a Very Promising Invention. Winifred Weatherby is fourteen, and unlike other girls, though she is at a dull and posh finishing school, whilst her father tinkers with his Telauto invention – where he can write a letter to someone with another Telauto machine, and have the letter arrive instantly – but Winifred has made a few modifications to it, in secret. Yet when her father goes missing, and a mysterious figure takes intense interest in Winnie’s inventions – fiercely protected by Winnie and roommate Adelaide at Beacon Academy for Poised and Polished Young Ladies. Soon though, Winnie is recruited by Mrs Campbell to be the inventress and quartermistress for the Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies to track down who Mr Magpie is – and how he keeps getting away. Yes, that’s right – Winnie, Adelaide, Celeste, Effie and Stella – are spies. As they learn spy craft and techniques to blend in, they encounter many challenges, get to meet the Queen, and Winnie is in her element – creating inventions and weapons for her friends. And yet, I got the sense that things were not as they seem – as it always is in crime and mystery novels, and Alison cleverly threw red herrings to the reader, concealing clues and using deft sleight of hand to ensure as a reader, your suspicions are in a different place. It shows that there are so many ways to tell a mystery story even if you are using the same tropes that are often used. It’s all about how the author and story execute them for the reader – and the lovely thing about this is that even if seasoned mystery readers recognise them, a book like this will always be someone’s first experience of the genre. A perfect combination for a wide range of readers.

Of course, she also manages to pull her clues as to who might be behind it together well too, and there is a sense that the same person could be working to take down the royal family as well as Winnie’s father. The girls are far from shrinking violets – they’re adept at hiding in plain sight, listening, tracking people down, and helping each other – uniting against a patriarchal system that would prefer them to be at home as mothers rather than inventing cool things to help you dress, meeting the queen, and tackling renegade Scotland Yard detectives with ulterior motives. This book celebrates science, technology – as it was during Victorian times, creativity, friendship and what women are capable of – what it means to find your place and family. And this shows that those who are family can be people you meet later in life too.

Of course, no spy novel would be complete without a few chases and hurdles, threats and secrets, and these compelling aspects give the book the vim and vigour within the pages, exploring the possibilities of history within a fictional context, and using the historical facts that Alison found, and has explored a bit of a what if scenario with some things, and showing that history is wild, intriguing and has much more to the story than we have in the history books. It’s exciting to read books like this that give insight into what could have been, what could have happened. And I do love books where girls get to be the heroes in different ways, and this book celebrates diversity and difference, which makes it a powerful story about female friendship and what it means to find your true place amongst those who share interests and ambitions, and I think this is a fantastic middle grade story for readers aged eleven and over.