48 pages • 1 hour read
Ally CarterI'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Gallagher School for Exceptional Girls
The Gallagher Academy is the main setting of the novel. On the outside, the school looks like a normal mansion, but inside, laboratories, subbasements, and secret passages allow Cammie and her friends to conduct research and sneak off school property. During the Code Red in the early chapters, the school uses built-in technology to hide evidence of spy activity, turning the academy into the elite boarding school its formal name suggests. Retinal scanners to enter classrooms and specific languages/dialects to be spoken at lunch show how, even outside of class, the girls never truly stop training.
Carter weaves real history around the one created for the school. The Gallagher Academy was founded by the fictional spy Gilly Gallagher, famous among spies for stopping an assassin no one’s ever heard of from killing Abraham Lincoln. Her sword rests in the academy’s main hall and is the school and Gallagher family crest. Gillian represents the ingenuity of women and, specifically, how the sisterhood bands together to better technology and intel collection. Things like duct tape are attributed to the Gallagher girls, as well as discoveries like how no two sets of fingerprints are the same. By building and re-appropriating history into the Gallagher world, Carter grounds the novel in the real world while still having it be strictly fiction.
Covert Operations Class
Covert Operations is the only class that gets time on the page throughout the novel. Cammie and her friends are required to take a semester of Covert Operations, after which the class becomes optional as the girls start to specialize in courses that are best suited to their capabilities as a spy. In the past, the class was taught by a professor who mainly told stories from their time in the field, and the introduction of Mr. Solomon suggests both that the class will be taught differently going forward and also that the lessons learned in Covert Operations will be key to the plot of the story.
Cammie and her friends use the tactics Mr. Solomon teaches in class to investigate Josh, including going through Josh’s trash and observing his life from multiple angles. Covert Operations also symbolizes the serious side of being a spy. Following their first assignment, Cammie returns to school and is tricked into believing Liz and Bex were captured and tortured for information. Following this incident, Cammie and her friends resolve to do better, which makes tracking Josh’s movements a way for them to make up for sloppy past work. The Covert Operations final exam shows how much the girls have learned in a semester, including strategies Mr. Solomon doesn’t expect, proving both that the class has been educational and that there are some things that cannot be taught in a classroom.
The Earrings
In Chapter 20, Josh gives Cammie a pair of silver earrings. While the earrings themselves only appear in the latter third of the book, they offer powerful symbolism for Cammie’s desire to be a “normal” girl. Prior to receiving the earrings, Cammie spends time with Josh because she likes him and is just having a good time being a girl. After the earrings, Cammie realizes the seriousness of the double life she’s trying to live. The earrings are concrete proof of Josh’s existence that anyone in the academy could discover. They are both an item Cammie treasures and a liability for her cover story.
After Josh discovers the truth about Cammie going to the Gallagher Academy, Cammie returns the earrings. Though she holds on to a shred of hope that there’s a future for her and Josh, she knows in this moment that their worlds can’t mix. Returning the earrings represents Cammie giving up on being “normal.” She knows she’s meant to be a spy and that she can do more good in the world with the skills she’s honed at school. Keeping the earrings would only serve as a distraction she can’t afford as she enters the latter, more difficult years of training.
