Everything you know about Barbara Gordon up to this point, throw it out the window. This is a new story line that rocks. Barbara Gordon, hacker extraordinaire, has been left paralyzed following a gunshot wound. Now she is recovering and learning how to maneuver her new reality when a mystery grabs Barb by the ear and won't let go. Something strange is going on in the Arkham Center for Independence and anything name Arkham can't be good. Struggling with new friendships and past trauma, Barbara will use every ability she has to save a friend who accepts her just the way she is.

Overall I found this a great graphic novel. Barbara is a great hero for YA readers. Barbara may be in a wheelchair, but she refuses to let anyone say she or her friends need "fixed," because they aren't broken and they aren't alone. That is a good message.

Barbara “Babs” Gordan is a genius computer hacker. One night while she is attempting to solve a computer mystery, she is shot and paralyzed. As a result, she is sent to an Arkham rehap facility that is supposed to help her master her new wheelchair. Babs feels abandoned in this place and so she refuses to make any new friends. However, she can’t help herself and befriends another young girl who walks the halls at night. The young girl insists that her brother has disappeared and Babs is determined to find out the truth.

This was an interesting story and I found myself invested in the mystery. It didn’t feel like a traditional comic book, which is why I think it worked so well for me. I enjoyed the art and would be interested in reading more in this storyline. I love that Babs and her friends took their power. While this novel didn’t live in the superpower realm it was still empowering.

I loved this backstory of Barbara Gordon of the Batman Universe. She suffers significantly after a gunshot wound, with both physical and mental injuries, and I loved that lesson that disabilities are not something that needs to be healed or fixed. It is such a fantastic and robust message to have in YA books, graphic novels, and the DC universe. The reader gets the whole story of how she became the oracle. At first, she pushes everyone away, and her story into her full potential as the oracle was great to see. I also loved the art style in this all-new graphic novel.

DC's re-imagined YA graphic novels continue to be well-worth the wait to get them. The Oracle Code tells of Babs and her recovery after being shot and paralyzed. Babs is frustrated, and feels like she can no longer trust her instincts. Her father sends her to a rehabilitation clinic where she meets some other like-minded students who try to help Babs get her focus back, but there is something hinky going on as well. Nijkamp is wonderfully suited to write this, it reads very realistic and does not shy away from Babs' trauma.

Barbara Gordon is hacker extraordinaire in Gotham City, at least for a teenager. One night she makes the mistake of confronting a robber and ends up shot and partially paralyzed. She's sent to Arkham Center for Children to receive treatment and rehabilitate. While there she makes new friends and runs into a mystery. Her friend that sleepwalks claims her brother's disappeared, but the doctor says that he died in a fire. A few nights later her friend also disappears, only to be told that the mysterious benefactor can no longer fund her friend's care and so she was sent to a new place. Babs is ready to put her skills, and friendships, to the test and discover the truth behind the creepy old mansion and what really happened to the missing kids.

Great artwork, lots of diversity, I'm not someone that has a disability so I can't comment on the ways they were portrayed, but they seemed to be accurately and not grossly done. I really enjoyed this, though I do wish that for a story called Oracle Code, there was more actual hacking that took place. Most of her hacking involved breaking into actual doors and not networks, and she's not a very good one if the first time she tries to break into the network she gets caught.

Well worth the read and great for any middle schooler who enjoys the Batman world and wants to know more about the other characters involved.

Copy provided by NetGalley.

This was a great graphic novel. After Barbara Gordon is shot and her legs are paralyzed, she is sent to the Arkham Center for Independence to recover the use of her legs. However, it's not long before she's in the middle of another mystery with kids going missing from the center.
The artwork on this one is amazing. It did a great job of helping to tell the story. The book is a good mix of Barbara's struggle with her condition and the mystery with the missing kids. I think they did a good job of adapting this for a teen audience since Barbara's story is very difficult.

I don’t know how I felt about this one. I feel like these new YA DC stories have been either a hit or miss for me.Going in, I don’t really know much about Barbara and have only really read her beginning, her accident with the Joker and the new 52 of when she comes back. So I feel like I know a little about her character and her personality.

We start off the story with Barabara going to a rehabilitation center to help her get better. The story of how Barabra had her accident is different from the story we know. I think one of the things that was putting me off, is how everyone and I’m pretty sure I do mean everyone, just wanted to fix her. The word kept being thrown around so much, that I was getting tired of hearing it. I think I kept expecting to see the Batgirl or Oracle that I know, but this was just really more like the beginnings of it. Some of the personality was the same, but I don’t think I could get past all the differences.

I really loved the artwork. I thought it was fantastic and I loved the colors. In the end, I think the story was okay. Wasn’t my favorite and I think it’s because I was so in the mind set that It was going to be Babs dealing with the aftermath of the Joker shooting her, but it really wasn’t that at all. I think it would definitely be interesting to new readers though.

Note: I am an able-bodied person and am reviewing through that lens.

I’m not super familiar with the DC world, but I was very interested in a disabled main character and #ownvoices author. There is not enough representation of diverse voices and I’m happy to see that more is forthcoming.

Barbara “Babs” Gordon, teen hacker, is shot when she gets too close to an armed robbery. The resulting paralysis leads to her stay at the Arkham Center for Independence for rehab and working to adapt to her new normal. At first she resists everything and everyone, but as she makes new friends and learns more about her new surroundings, she wonders if something else is going on behind the scenes.

Even though the main character is white, many of the background characters and her new friends are people of color with a variety of different ability-levels. I really appreciated the emphasis on how disabilities don’t need to be “fixed” and how having a disability is not the end of a person’s life. This issue is not with the disability, but with our ableist society. Things are not accessible to everyone and society needs to work on changing, so people aren’t having to put so much effort into learning how to navigate the minefield of everyday life. Babs takes classes on how to navigate obstacles with her wheelchair. These “obstacles” are things like steep ramps and low curbs—something an able-bodied person might just step over. We should be making things easier for everyone, not making people with disabilities jump through extra hoops. Anyway, I appreciated that Nijkamp called attention to these small moments!

Overall, I enjoyed this peek into the DC Universe and loved the focus on a female disabled hacker, friendship, and a mystery in a mansion!

*Thank you to NetGalley and DC Comics for providing a digital copy.*

Whether you are an old fan liking Barbara Gordon in the wheelchair or a new one looking for a place to begin in comics, this YA story is ready for you. This time around there are no connections to the Bat family or Rogues Galley so Barbara Gordon is going solo to become her own hero. But it takes a lot for Babs to do that after what put her in a wheelchair. Not just the gunshot but what lead up to it. Not to mention being in a place with Arkham in the name feels dreading. Justly so because there seems to be something good on in the wall of the institute and Babs is going to need all the friends she can get.

This GN is practically the perfect parallel to Gail Simone's Batgirl. Stories of confronting trauma that force Barbara Gordon out of her comfort zone. Because by all accounts, trauma is something that haunts people and just because you can recover physically, the mental wounds are more serious. It's the attacks on what empowers people that really strikes at them, especially when they are the only ones who believe it.

Stay tuned for a full review on Monkeys Fighting Robots.

It seemed like a little bit was missing, but maybe that is because i don't know much about Barbara Gordon or her origin story. I'm not well versed in DC, and although I want to and am learning I had lots of questions with this book.

An intersting addition to this well liked author's body of work. I will have no problem getying my YA readers to pick this up.

The Oracle Code is the story of Barbara Gordon who was shot by the Joker and paralyzed during the story The Killing Joke. In this story author, Marieke Nijkamp reimagines her origin story and has Barbara shot during a random crime. She never became Batgirl, she went from being the Commissioner's daughter who used her laptop to trace crimes to being in her wheelchair. She is sent to the Arkham Center for Independence to "get better".

The art is absolutely beautiful. It fits the story well and the switch between the stories the children in the rehab center tell and the main story is powerful. I love the color choices and overall it was a beautiful book. About halfway through the book one of the kids in the center tells Barbara stories. Those stories were amazing. I would love to see a series that was these stories. They have all of the fun aspects of a ghost story and I absolutely loved them.

Overall the story irritated me. I don't know if it is because I am also disabled. I have chronic pain issues and the language used even by those who cared for the kids was frustrating. Barbara was sent to Arkham because she needed to be "fixed". The book had lines like "No child should have to suffer being less than whole." and "They are broken and won't be missed." I understand that it is the villains saying some of these things, but it was upsetting to see those things written in a book meant for children. If it was upsetting for an adult to see those things written about people themselves, imagine the frustration of a child seeing those things. Or maybe I am just reading too much into it?

Nijkamp's adaptation of Barbara Gordon's experience in the Arkham Center for Independence is told well and is supported by Manuel Preitano's excellent illustrations but falls short due to predictability at points. The story also falls prey to the stereotype of the evil doctors experimenting on the helpless patients (until Barbara can save the day) and I was hoping this might break that tired storyline. Even though I was hoping for something new and different, the book was enjoyable.

Commissioner Gordon's daughter, coder Barbara Gordan loses the use of her legs and is sent to a rehabilitation center. When patients start disappearing, Barbara searches for answers.
I was excited to try to book by Marieke Nijkamp and I wanted to like it, but it didn't work for me. The first half was boring and even though it picked up towards the end, it was a predictable conclusion. I appreciate that the book included diverse characters and characters with physical disabilities. I recommend this to fans of the main character.

This origin story for Oracle has Barbara Gordon as a teen hacker who becomes paralyzed and is sent to a rehabilitation center. Being in Gotham City, this center is not like the ones you might find in a real center. As children disappear, Babs' instincts drive her to find out what happened to them. Is this a mystery... or a ghost story?

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher I was able to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
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The Oracle Code is a graphic novel under DCs Ink Imprint line which targets the YA reading crowd, and is separate from the DC Universe overall. There are nods to the DC world but the stories you read are not the comic origins of these characters. Just putting that out there right away.
Barbara, a young teen hacker, gets in the way of a robbery and ends up paralyzed. Her father, Commissioner Gordon, sends her to Arkham Center for Independence to recover. While there she starts to notice odd things, a mystery is forming around her but is Barbara ready to throw herself onto another mystery when the last time she searched out a puzzle it left her paralyzed?
I love the art style for this, I like the pop of colors used, how the characters you know and meet are distinct and defined and the other characters are almost shadows which adds a bit to the creep factor with the weird sounds and stories that Barbara gets told from one of the girls there. There is definitely a darker, creepy, more sinister edge to this story than some of the other Ink stories I’ve read which is cool because it shows variety in the stories they want to tell. I like the Barbara you get here, she is relearning who she thinks she is, she finds independence and strength with others at the institute and I love that the friends she makes have been there and they aren’t going to let her hide from them.

I think you really have to remember that the DC Ink imprint is supposed to be separate from the actual DC universe. Barbara Gordon has always been one of my favorite DC characters, so I was curious to see how her transition to Oracle would play out. I do really like the fact that this is about the struggle after what paralyzed Barbara Gordon (important note here that the Joker has nothing to do with it), but I think what I found most clever about other books in the imprint are the subtle homages to the DC universe, which I feel like was completely missing here.

Overall, good, and a book I wouldn't mind handing to kids.

This is a wonderful book. Really entertaining and fits with the character. It’s a solid story that includes great new characters.

I was so relieved when I saw Marieke Nijkamp was writing the Barbara Gordon entry in the DC Ink series, and they didn't let me down! Context: pretty much all the DC Ink books are meant to be standalone entry points to a single character in the DC universe for young readers who aren't familiar with their lengthy, often self-contradictory backstory in other comics. So this is NOT a retelling of The Killing Joke or anything like that. Batman doesn't even feature, nor Dick Grayson or the Birds of Prey. (Black Canary also has her own book in the DC Ink series; I don't know if there's any plan to eventually bring some of the disparate books together in the future.) Barbara is introduced as a computer-savvy teen whose interest in crime stems from worry about her policeman father. In the first few pages, she follows him to a crime scene and is shot; the rest of the book takes place at the rehab center she is sent to in order to learn how to navigate life in a wheelchair. Babs is understandably having a hard time adjusting, especially since her best friend from before the shooting is ignoring her texts, but several other girls at the rehab center are persistent in offering their friendship, and the sudden disappearance of one of them spurs her to return to detective mode. Is the moral of the book (disabled people don't need to be "fixed", they need to be respected as whole human beings) presented in a subtle way? No. Is it GREAT for a middle-grade book? Yup! I really hope that Nijkamp (and Manuel Preitano, whose art is a perfect complement to the story) will be returning for more Oracle books, because this was absolutely fantastic.

One final note: I complained in my review of Shadow of the Batgirl about the way Barbara's wheelchair was glossed over when the setting included stairs to navigate. Here, there's a scene in which three girls who use mobility aids have to confront a non-accessible staircase: one of them has learned a technique for getting her wheelchair down a flight of stairs backwards, but Barbara doesn't know how, because she hasn't been taught it yet. So their third friend, who uses crutches, helps get Barbara's wheelchair to the bottom while Barbara climbs down. It's a small scene but it's one of the little moments of authenticity you only get when you hire Own Voices writers. So, if you're listening, DC: it does matter, and we do notice.

Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, never intended to be shot. Frustrated and afraid, she is deposited at the Arkham Center for Independence. Commissioner Gordon is unsure of how to address his daughter as she works to regain her sense of self during physical and mental rehabilitation. With a wheelchair as her new normal, she is angry enough to avoid making friends. However, one night a young girl comes to her begging for the protection of her brother. Barbara has the feeling that something is dangerously wrong. Unable to shake the weird sounds surrounding her at night and the fact that residents seem to suddenly disappear, Barbara contacts her father but soon discovers she's going to have to put the pieces together with the help of her new friends in the facility and discover her new life as Oracle.

The Oracle Code is the type of graphic novel that feels impossible to put down.  Author Marieke Nijkamp tells an amazing story that keeps readers turning pages. Paired with the beautiful art by Manuel Preitano, The Oracle Code is fast-paced and wonderful. I'm a big fan of the idea that to be it, we need to see it. The Oracle Code is highly inclusive for people with mobility challenges and it is wonderful to see a graphic novel that is so careful to show that wheelchairs are not the end, but a different way of life.