Scout’s Honor
by Lily Anderson
Henry Holt, 2022. 403 pages.
Review written October 24, 2022, from a library book
2023 Printz Honor Book
Scout’s Honor is the story of Prudence Perry, a legacy scout with the Ladybirds. The Ladybird Scouts are a secret society that to the world outside appears to be about having tea and serving cookies to students taking the SAT. But in actuality, they are about fighting monsters — specifically, mulligrubs that come from another dimension and feed on people’s emotions. Only legacy scouts and those who drink the Tea of Seeing can see the grubs, but everyone feels the effects. The Ladybird scouts patrol and fight grubs to keep their neighborhoods safe.
Most mulligrubs just zap your energy when they consume your emotions, but if they become carnivorous, they consume people. And three years ago, when Prudence was thirteen, she saw a carnivorous grub do exactly that, when her friend and sister scout died in the jaws of a scranch.
Prue quit the Ladybirds after that. She felt responsible and continued to have PTSD about the incident, which her friends think was a mountain lion attack.
But her mother wasn’t happy about Prue withdrawing from the Ladybirds. And this summer, with two new scouts turning thirteen and ready to be trained, after Prue gets caught sneaking out, the punishment is that she is responsible for training the new recruits.
Right from the start, there’s a fiasco and some of Prue’s other friends drink the Tea of Seeing. But during the summer, Prue learns from her now three new recruits and wonders if there might be a better, gentler, less competitive way to be a Ladybird. Though all along she worries that the babybirds don’t realize how dangerous fighting mulligrubs can be.
The book is entertaining and just a little bit silly, as it portrays the Ladybirds being about all things pink and bloodthirsty fighting techniques. Some of the little details of the world-building didn’t quite work for me, but if you take it as entertainment, with thoughts thrown in about gender roles and responsibilities, it’s an awful lot of fun.
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