Audio ARC provided via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.



My personal rating of the book: 2 stars

Rating based on quality of the writing etc: 3 stars



Audio review first - narrator was good, bringing life to the story and characters.





Main review:



I was invited to read this book and the cover, title and to an extent the blurb, led me to believe this would be far more historical fiction than it was. In actual fact, this is commercial women's fiction with one of the two pov narratives in period costume. There is nothing wrong with commercial women's fiction but it's not something I would have ever chosen to read willingly. Instead of details about the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park and a more cerebral portrayal of WWII Britain with good historical detail, everything was left very vague or really dumbed down. This was echoed in the modern era where the MC is a brilliant computer code writer with a successful business...which is kept very vague and really dumbed down.



In the end, the very things that will make it appeal to fans of CWF - the underdeveloped MCs that can be used as masks to experience the story, the convenient (contrived) plotpoints, the low level conflict and tension and the utter certainty that everything will be fine - are what made me dislike the book. So once again, I am not the target audience. I found both Pam - a supposed maths genius destined for Oxford university - and Julia, successful business woman who is supposed to be a code wizard, unbelievably stupid. It's obvious what's going in with pretty much every other character in this book but especially the male leads. The two teen sons are ridiculously understanding and well behaved - to the point where I wondered if there was a bodysnatchers subplot.



Anyway, I can see that while not written for me, it handles the tropes of the genre and the desires of its target audience well. I wish it had been marketed with more accuracy but I imagine there is a huge audience out there who will love this. Which doesn't unfortunately include me.