🥚What a wonderful book! This middle grade book tells the story of the young women (teenagers!) who worked at Bletchley Park intercepting Nazi messages to be sorted and decoded. They even helped with decoding the messages. These were exceptionally smart and talented ladies!

🪿 The ladies worked there in secret. They were not allowed to talk about the work they were doing to anyone – sometimes they didn’t know the full scope of what they were working on themselves.

🥚 Interspersed within the compelling non-fiction narrative are detailed sections about how to create and break codes and how coding machines like Enigma worked. Code breaking is very mathematical, and I was really into coded messages when I was younger, so I loved these added bits of info.

🪿 Winston Churchill called these young women “…my geese who lay the golden eggs – and never cackle.” He was proud of these highly intelligent young women who were providing invaluable assistance in the war effort, while maintaining utter and complete secrecy about what they were doing.

🥚 I highly recommend this book, particularly for classroom libraries. This book will be available on 5 Mar 2024.

Thank you @netgalley and @scholastic for an eARC of this book, which I have read and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.

This is a lot like the similarly titled Enigma Girls by Tessa Dunlop, only with more pictures and an emphasis on the younger women working at the Park. Though this book advertises it is about ten teens that broke the code, I would argue that eighteen is more young adulthood than teens. But younger readers just learning about this era will enjoy this introduction to Most Secret Sources.

A solid 4. I loved Fleming's book on Leopold and Loeb. This is an entirely different kind of book. First of all, it includes excellently place historical photos that students will enjoy looking at. Also, if you are a teacher with students interested in how math works in the world-they will be thrilled with this. Finally, a relatively easy read (7th-10th gr?) about complex math and logic puzzles. I know some students who will be obsessed with all the intermission sections on ciphers and codebreaking. I learned things I didn't know about the teenagers who were working away throughout the War to intercept messages. Also, I think the tech geeks will really enjoy the appearance of early computers. As a people person, I cannot imagine the complexity of an operation like this, and the weight of the secrets pressing down on teen girls in their daily work. Wow! Fleming is an exceptional writer and this is a great nonfiction contribution.

This was super interesting to learn about, and it was crazy that it's a true story! I had never hear for this before, but it was super interesting to hear the stories of all this different girls.working during the war!