I selected this audiobook somewhat randomly on the Libby app when I suddenly needed some listening material for an afternoon in the car and none of my podcasts were appealing. I wasn’t expecting much of it but really got into it and enjoyed it. I was put off by the title, if it had been something more like “code breaking girl mathematician can’t get a job doing what she actually wants but saves the day anyway” it’d have been more enticing, to me at least. It was perhaps all a bit of a girls own story but at the moment that’s fine with me and, somewhat paradoxically, I found the wartime setting really comforting. I think that’s because a lot of my favourite childhood books were set during the second world war so it’s an era that invokes safety to me, assured as I’ve always been in the knowledge that it all ends up being alright in the end, even if the characters I’m reading about don’t know that. At the moment that’s a good concept to bear in mind.

In fact I enjoyed this enough that I decided to carry straight on and listen to the next audiobook in the series, but that was a bad idea. There was a different narrator which seemed all wrong, I should have left it for a while. I think I will try reading the next one sometime soon though.