The historical time period in this story, as well as the type of people who were featured was very interesting! It was during World War II, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t read about the women working on breaking codes, at least not in a story. There were a few details mentioned in the story that I did recognize from movies or other books about the code breakers, like Alan Turing and ENIGMA. But then there was info about Washington DC, like the area where the Pentagon was built and what it had been before they put that building there. I want to read more on that history for sure.

I really liked the mystery. I loved how the characters were code-breakers, and they used these skills that were part of their jobs to be applied to trying to solve murders of people close to them, or similar enough that they could see how they were also in danger. The author did a great job of even keeping me as the reader guessing about who it could possibly be. I had a couple different guesses, and one turned out to be right in the end, but that was after I’d been thrown off track a little bit with some of the solutions the girls came up with for the suspected perpetrator.

While this is a YA book, the characters are actually more new adult age in my opinion. Also, personally the romance was a little extra for me in that I don’t feel it necessarily added that much to the story. I get that it adds the little extra with LGBTQ characters. And maybe gave a little more reason for them to connect? It just at times seemed thrown in and not crucial for the storyline or even the character’s growth. As I’ve mentioned before, third person isn’t always my favorite way to tell a story. However this story did use that in a way that we were able to kind of get the story from more than just Kit’s viewpoint at times.

In the end I liked the story enough that I’ll be adding it to my school library as well as recommending it for my state school library association’s reader award nominees for the future.

Review first posted on Lisa Loves Literature.