The Bletchley RiddleReview posted January 2, 2025.
Viking, 2024. 394 pages.
Review written January 2, 2025, from my own copy, sent to me by the publisher.
Starred Review
2024 Cybils Finalist, Elementary/Middle Grade Fiction
2024 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#5 More Children's Fiction
I quickly read this book at the end of 2024, after finishing my reading for the Cybils Awards, because I had a strong suspicion it would end up making my Sonderbooks Stand-outs list, and I didn't want to wait a year. For one thing, it's about code-breaking at Bletchley Park during World War II, and for another, two stellar writers collaborated on it. Ruta Sepetys specializes in detailed historical fiction, and Steve Sheinkin writes engaging historical nonfiction. Both have won numerous awards for their work.
This is the year for World War II books! I was glad I read this book after reading Candace Fleming's nonfiction The Enigma Girls, because that gave the nonfiction side of what happened at Bletchley Park, outside of London - a top secret code-breaking operation with many, many different aspects. The Bletchley Riddle fictionalizes that story and gives us a 19-year-old brother Jakob working at Bletchley Park with his 14-year-old sister Lizzie.
The story is engaging - pulling us into real-life spy work. It begins in 1940, before Britain has been pulled into war with Germany, but when they are expecting it. And the book opens with half-American Lizzie giving her chaperone the slip. She leaves him on a ship bound for America, while she escapes her rich American grandmother's plans and shows up at the address in London where her brother has been receiving mail. Receiving mail, but never answering it.
Their mother had worked for the American embassy, but recently traveled to Poland and was there when the Germans attacked. She did not return, so she's been presumed dead - but Lizzie doesn't believe it for a minute. When she's offered a messenger job at Bletchley Park, where Jakob is working, she hopes that being on the scene she might get leads on what has become of her mother.
Now, after reading The Enigma Girls, it felt a little unrealistic that Jakob would have any idea what was going on in other parts of the estate, but it's not like they gave away a whole lot. I also had a hard time believing 14-year-old Lizzie would be hired as a messenger, taking messages between buildings - but the authors specifically mention in a historical note that Bletchley Park in fact hired messengers as young as 14.
But the story does put in details about how the team at Bletchley made breakthroughs in decoding German messages - including using a replica enigma machine smuggled out of Poland by three mathematicians. The details of the codebreaking were really fun, and we've got an additional mystery of what happened to Jakob and Lizzie's mother. Oh, and Lizzie also wants to continue to thwart her grandmother's plans to send her to America, so she has to elude the chaperone more than once. There are actual historical characters sprinkled throughout the story, and I loved a diversion involving Alan Turing, which the Historical Note tells us is completely based in truth.
Now, I did wonder if MI6 really would have been suspicious of folks working at Bletchley Park. There's a shadowy character surveilling Lizzie and Jakob because of their mother, which almost felt like one thread too many, but I think in a middle grade novel this simply ups the suspense.
I did have a hard time deciding how to rank this book on my Stand-outs against Max in the House of Spies by Adam Gidwitz, and on another day, this one might have come out ahead. They were both about puzzles and spy activities in London. Max has more of a feel of the children's classic The Great Brain and also addressed anti-Semitism in Britain at the time, but it felt a touch less believable. (I think Max was 12 - would they really let him be a spy?) And this one was simply full of authentic historical details - I just thought the puzzles were a little more fun for the reader in Max. (And remember, Sonderbooks Stand-outs are not chosen based on literary merit, but simply on how much I enjoyed the reading experience.) Bottom line, this is a wonderful spy novel for middle grade readers, full of cool spy problems and firmly rooted in historical fact.