Literacy



** Our novel for the term is 'StormBreaker' by Anthony Horowitz. **

 A fourteen-year-old boy, Alex Rider, learns of the death of his uncle and adopted parent, Ian Rider in a deadly car crash. Alex is suspicious (because he knows that, despite what the police told him after the crash, Ian Rider always wore his seatbelt), and decides to investigate. He finds that Ian Rider did not die in a car crash, and was, in fact, a spy who had been shot before completing his last mission. He had actually been training Alex (who already speaks [|German], [|Spanish], [|French], [|English], and is a black-belt in karate) for a career in MI6. [|Alan Blunt] and his second-in-command, [|Mrs Jones], of MI6, ask Alex to pick up his uncle's assignment, investigating [|Herod Sayle], a Lebanese millionaire (Egyptian in the American version) who is giving free "Stormbreaker" computers to every school in Britain. As an undercover agent, Alex travels to Sayle's home in Cornwall, and, following the path drawn by his uncle, discovers a large computer manufacturing facility, where the Stormbreaker computers are being tainted with smallpox virus. Before he can communicate with MI6, however, Alex is caught. Sayle leaves Alex to die in a tank with a [|Portuguese Man o' War] and heads off to the [|Science Museum] in London, where the Prime Minister is to activate the Stormbreakers, unwittingly releasing the deadly virus. Alex escapes, parachutes out of a hijacked aeroplane, and smashes through the roof of the Science Museum. With a stolen gun, he fires at the Stormbreakers and Sayle, almost hitting the Prime Minister in the process. The Stormbreakers are immediately recalled. After a debriefing by MI6, Alex gets into a taxi, intending to head home. The driver is Sayle, who had survived the attack and fled. He pushes Alex to the top of a building, intending to shoot him; Sayle, however, is himself shot from a helicopter by Yassen Gregorovich, a mysterious assassin who was earlier contracted to kill Ian Rider. Alex tells Yassen he will one day kill him, but Yassen brushes the comment aside, telling him to forget about being a spy.



**We are focusing on ‘facts and detail’ ** **as well as ** **spelling - the 'r' sound. **