The Bletchley Riddle
by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin
Middle School, High School    Viking    400 pp.
10/24    9780593527542    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780593527566    $10.99

It’s the summer of 1940 in this collaboration between Sepetys (whose historical fiction for older readers includes, recently, I Must Betray You, rev. 5/22) and Sheinkin (primarily nonfiction, recently Impossible Escape, rev. 9/23). Hitler has taken over most of Europe and is about to attack England, as top minds at Bletchley Park, outside of London, race to break German codes that could alert the Allies of Nazi battle plans. Nineteen-year-old Jakob Novis works at Bletchley Park, while his fourteen-year-old sister, Lizzie, is consumed with finding their embassy-worker mother, Willa, presumed dead in the German invasion of Poland in 1939. But Lizzie doesn’t believe it. She tracks down clues of her own as the codebreakers race to crack a cipher created by the Nazis’ Enigma machine. Secrets build upon secrets, riddles upon riddles, and figuring them out might just save a family, or a world. The fifty riveting final pages are a master class in suspense, as Lizzie risks going to London just as the Luftwaffe readies for their attack on the city. Jakob steals a car to find Lizzie, and as they drive off back to Bletchley after learning shocking revelations about their family, the sky fills with airplanes, “a sinister swarm of evil black birds…Hitler’s wrath is descending.” With its expert pacing and characterization and its careful delineation of historical and family stories, this is historical fiction at its best. A note and photographs are appended.

From the ">September/October 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.