Hello all of Alice’s American friends! Thank you for all the support you have given her so far! It has been THRILLING to see her first adventure being welcomed with such enthusiasm in the United States!
This week, Alice’s second adventure lands in America, and lands is the right word, as you’ll see from the cover. If Alice’s first adventure was all about trains, this one is all about planes! Alice is at the Paris World’s Fair in a race against time to track down both a missing engineer and the plans to a super spy plane, all while working undercover making her delicious pastries.
Real World Inspiration
The World’s Fair that Alice works at was inspired by a real life event that happened in Paris in 1937 – the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. It lasted for six months and the whole world came to Paris and each country built special pavilions to show off the very best it had to offer in engineering, arts, fashion, food and industry. With so many countries gathered together I just knew that there would have to have been spies there.
Actual Spying – In fact, there was even spying going on on before the fair opened! The Germany pavilion was designed by Hitler’s favourite architect and he later admitted that he had seen the plans for the Soviet pavilion before working on it.
Young Engineers – One of the new friends that Alice makes is Sophie – a young engineer. Sophie is building her own tiny plane on the roof of one of the pavilions at the fair. The inspiration for Sophie was a woman called Raymonde de Laroche, who is thought to be the world’s first female pilot. She was just 27 when she learned how to fly and she was the first woman to be given a pilots licence. But because flying was considered too dangerous for woman in World War 1, she had to be a driver instead.
Hidden Codes – There are lots of hidden codes in this new adventure. I can’t tell you where, because that would give the game away, but I was inspired by reading about all the ingenious way that codebreakers hid their codes during the war. Codes were hidden in paintings, crosswords, music, stitching, every way you could think of. Can you think of how you would cleverly hide a secret message so no-one could find it?
Cakes – Of course it wouldn’t be an Alice book without cake! This time round she has to create special chocolates as well as cakes and her icing skills are put to the test working against the clock to create masterpieces at a moments notice. It’s always a race against time with Alice!
I hope you enjoy Alice’s new adventure, and look out for the third instalment coming in the spring!!!
Sarah Todd Taylor 