The Recruit

The Recruit by British author Robert Muchamore (Hodder Children’s Books, 2004) is the first book in the middle-grade spy adventure CHERUB series and follows a 12-year-old boy who is plucked from a difficult life to become a spy. The book offers a look at the opportunities presented by change while exploring themes of overcoming fear, seeing issues from both sides, and making difficult choices. The Recruit was nominated for eight awards and won seven of them, including the Red House Children’s Book Award, the Bolton Children’s Book Award, and the Medway Children’s Book Award. Hodder released a graphic novel adaptation in 2012. Muchamore has penned several books for young readers and is best known for CHERUB, as well as the Henderson’s Boys and Rock War series. Muchamore wrote The Recruit for his nephew, who complained of having nothing good to read, and following that, Muchamore set out to address the early 2000s drought of middle-grade books. 

This guide is based on the 2010 Simon Pulse hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of death, child abuse, bullying, and animal cruelty.

Plot Summary

The Recruit follows 12-year-old James Choke (later James Adams) on his journey from living in a troubled home to becoming a kid spy. At the novel’s opening, James is suspended from school after shoving a girl who bullied him in class. When his mother, who runs a shoplifting ring in London, dies later that night, James and his half-sister Lauren are separated—Lauren to go with her abusive father and James into the foster care system. James knows his mom left a stash of money in her safe. Determined to keep Lauren’s father from getting his hands on it, James cracks the safe’s lock and steals the money, which he brings to the children’s home, where he’ll stay until he’s adopted.

The home is a mess but no worse than what James is used to. He befriends his roommate and starts sessions with a therapist, neither of which helps James to feel settled. When he gets mixed up with a bad crowd and tries to shoplift, James is arrested but is let off with a warning. The next morning, James wakes in a strange place that he quickly learns is the local headquarters of CHERUB, an organization that trains orphan kids to be spies. James spends the day in rigorous entrance exams, which he passes. After learning that both his roommate and the therapist have ties to the organization, James decides to join, knowing its better than getting in trouble on the streets.

Over the next few weeks, James takes classes to prepare for basic training—a 100-day program where recruits are tested to their physical and psychological limits. Since James is deathly afraid of the water, this preparation includes swimming lessons with an older girl named Amy. One night, James’s friends are sent to London on a mission, and James tags along so he can visit Lauren. The mission ends poorly, and the chairman of CHERUB puts pressure on James to pass basic training.

Basic training takes place in an isolated area of the CHERUB campus. The recruits are split into teams of two, and James winds up with Kerry—a girl who failed basic training last year because she broke her knee. With Kerry’s help, James meets the challenges of basic training, and in exchange, he helps protect her knee, which is still healing. On Christmas day, the instructors bring the recruits to the regular part of campus so they can watch their friends eating dinner. Out of frustration, James attacks Kerry while they run the obstacle course, and the two are punished with a night outdoors in nothing but their underwear. Since it’s the dead of winter, the kids think fast to find a shelter and build a fire. Against the instructor’s expectations, they make it until morning.

The final segment of basic training is a three-day journey through the jungle of Malaysia. Working together, James and Kerry complete the mission with 30 minutes to spare and become full CHERUB agents. Shortly after, James learns Amy had James paired with Kerry to ensure he’d pass basic training because she needs him for a mission. The two will infiltrate Fort Harmony (a hippie colony) as siblings to identify members of Help Earth, an environmental activist/terrorist group that MI5 (British Intelligence) believes will bomb an oil executives convention.

Fort Harmony is completely off the grid, and James has an easier time adjusting to life without electricity than he expected. He makes friends with a few kids his age, as well as the suspected leader of Help Earth, finding everyone nice once he gets to know them. While out for a walk one night, James finds a hidden laboratory with equipment to build explosive devices. Here, James is exposed to anthrax, and he is rushed to the hospital, where he has a rough night reacting to medications before the doctors realize the strain of the disease is a weaker dose meant to immunize people. It’s revealed that Help Earth had been pumping this strain into the vent system at the convention center to immunize the people who work there so only the oil executives would be infected when the stronger strain was released during the convention.

All but one of the Help Earth operatives are arrested. The last one escapes custody, and James returns to Fort Harmony for one last night before he and Amy are extracted. In the middle of the night, police raid Fort Harmony, using unnecessary force to make everyone leave. James and Amy meet up with their handler to go back to CHERUB, where James discusses reservations about the mission with the chairman. James feels guilty about what happened to Fort Harmony and learns the important lesson that there are difficult parts of being a spy. For exemplary performance on the mission, the chairman makes James a senior agent, and the book ends with James starting to prepare for his second mission.