Candace Fleming’s The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets and Helped Win World War II (Scholastic Focus, 2024) is well worth the buzz that has been spreading about it. Although labeled a young adult nonfiction book, The Enigma Girls will interest anyone interested in the intellectual challenges to defeating Germany during World War II. The short chapters and Fleming’s personality-specific stories about young women doing specific jobs help draw the reader in to an engaging story about codes, ciphers, spies, and success. They say it takes a whole village to raise a child. Certainly, it took a whole nation of individuals to win the war as well. This is the story of a different battle in the war: The Enigma cipher.
As I began reading about Germany’s Enigma cipher, which Britain needed to solve in order to determine German war plans, I felt a sense of de ja vu. Sure enough, I’ve visited this subject before in my reading. I read and reviewed the young adult book Unbreakable two years ago. That book introduced the spies that were central to the decoding and “breaking” of the enigma cipher during World War II, just as this one did. However, Unbreakable had a broader scope, introducing a huge variety of different spies throughout the European theater who contributed to the effort in deciphering the enigma. As I wrote in the review at the time, I found myself a little lost in the many named spies and leaders.
This book also had a lot of people in various settings to remember. There was not a list of characters at the beginning to assist me. It turned out that it was okay. Fleming managed to make it work mostly because she focused her book on just a number of people, specifically women and specifically teenagers. They were all centered in England. These young women were cut off from each other (they most likely never met each other). They mostly just knew what job they were to do. With Fleming’s expertise, though, we get a glimpse of how they all fit together in deciphering the secrets.
Fleming’s book works well because of how she structured it. It’s true that I still can’t quite understand how the system worked to decipher German messages using math, language, electronics, and computers. But even as the war was happening, no one really did know the big picture. Fleming’s book gave a sense of purpose to all of the small parts. Each chapter was somewhat short and was written with the perspective of one of the workers. Or, at least, it related directly to the experience of one of the girls. The short chapters with person-specific info made the book move quickly. Further, Fleming did not ever weigh it down with technicalities. Some of the women were more skilled and intelligent and their work was not brainless. They needed high level math or computer or technical understanding. But I never felt I was missing anything because I did not understand the technicalities of their job. I just liked seeing how excited that young woman was to be using her skills.
Fleming did add a few pages, here and there, about how code-breaking and deciphering and language analysis worked. But these sections were also brief. Although The Enigma Girls was nonfiction, it moved quickly and kept my attention. This is essential for a successful book for younger readers. Because of its readability, I believe readers at middle grade reading level would enjoy it as well, not just young adults or adults for the subject matter.
This is an important story to contribute to the history of World War II. The women who ended up at Bletchley Park (the spy headquarters) were sworn to secrecy. In fact, the records of who and what did this work was not spoken of until after 1977. This fact makes these accounts of the rather unremarkable teenagers (for yes, they were teenagers when they first reported as volunteers for the war) interesting. They themselves went back and wrote their own stories after they had already grown to adulthood and then some. These were women who never bragged about what they did. Yet each step of the deciphering process was essential. Their work was essential. They were the essential workers of World War II.
