Review Detail

In about June of 1940, we meet 14-year-old Lizzie Novis, who is in a difficult circumstance; her Polish born Jewis father died when she was young, her mother, who worked for the US embassy in Poland, is presumed dead, and her grandmother, who lives in Cleveland, is trying to get her to leave England. Lizzie doesn't want anything to do with her grandmother's posh life in the US, and suspects that her mother is still alive. She manages to evade Mr. Fleetwood, her grandmother's estate steward who is supposed to chaperone her to Ohio via ship, and goes to the address in London her older brother Jakob has given her. Jakob, a talented mathemetician, is working at Bletchley Park, and the address Lizzie has is a decoy. When she shows up there, Jakob has to come and retrieve her. He takes her to the Colonel at Bletchley, who doesn't give Lizzie a choice; if she has to stay with Jakob, she has to sign the Official Secrets Act, work as a messenger at Bletchley, and lay low. While this impedes her work finding her mother, she enjoys being at the top secret installation, and enjoys living with Jakob in his tiny room at the Shoulder of Mutton. Colin, the son of the owners of the inn, is a good source of information as well as a helpful ally. Jakob knows more than he has told Lizzie; his mother visited him, and left him a coded message; Lizzie is not telling Jakob that she has her mother's journal. Jakob is working on the Enigma machine with other cryptanalysts, and wonders if his mother is, in fact, working as a spy. The fact that an MI5 agent, Jarvis, is following him and asking questions, reinforces this view. Lizzie manages to befrienf Marion, who is one of the women working at Bletchley, and even manages to go to a US embassy party with one of her mother's coworkers, and tries to ask Ambassador Joseph Kennedy about her. She gets no information, and is angry when she finds that her grandmother has sent Fleetwood back to get her. She manages to flee through a clever ruse, and Jakob is suprised when she shows up. When the two talk about their mother and finally share what they know, they think she has left them a message that the need to decipher. It takes some time, and relies on a shared memory code involving goulash, but they eventually figure out a time, date, and location. When they get there, however, they don't find their mother. They do find out information about her, and realize that they have to keep what they know secret, just as all of the work they do at Bletchley must never be discussed. Due to her uncanny ability to notice things, Lizzie becomes an assistant to the Colonel, and doesn't have to go to Cleveland after all.