The Codebreakers #3
By Roseanna M. White
Rating: 4
It’s World War I and men are scarce on the home front. Those that are in London rarely have any family local. Captain and Mrs. Blackwell are determined to do their part and help the young men who serve with him have a break in their routine. Twice a week new faces show up at the family dinner table and only a small handful are ever invited more than once. One day two young men are invited back, then again and again. Why? Captain Blackwell’s two lovely, talented daughters may have commented that they were intrigued!
While the book is predominantly about Lily Blackwell, Ivy, her sister, is her best friend and plays an integral part, but the story never shifts to her viewpoint. Ivy’s relationship with Lily is more important to our understanding than her life facts. Lily works for the intelligence department (unbeknownst to nearly everyone) and uses her photography skills to save lives.
The story is also told from Zivon Marin’s viewpoint, one of the lucky men who was invited back for dinner. Zivon is one of Russia’s top cryptographers and barely escaped the October Rising with his brother (who he believes is now dead thanks to a train accident). Britain responded to him first in his request for asylum (lucky for Lily) and he now works for the intelligence department, though neither Britain nor he knows if they can trust the other yet.
I quite enjoyed this book. Even though I started the series hoping there was more about codebreakers than it turned out to have, and this one had less than the others—as Lily is a very gifted photographer with mean darkroom skills—I still found it difficult to put down the series.
The inclusion of the Spanish Influenza took me by complete surprise; though in all honesty it really shouldn’t have. I knew the dates, location, and remember enough history that it should have been obvious. My excuse will be that I was so wrapped up in Zivon and Lily’s story that I forgot when I was for a moment. Lily volunteers at one of London’s hospitals and one of her best friends is Ara (a nurse and the female protagonist of book two in the series), so it’s only natural to include the flu in Lily’s life. But when ____ happened to ____! Ah! And then THAT happened. Oh!
As this was the final book in the trilogy, and Ara’s father was mentioned briefly early in the book, I would have liked another passing comment in the final chapter about him. After all, he had been in Mexico nine months by the end of this book, and I would have liked to know that Phillip and Arabelle would get their wedding sooner than later. At least Roseanna was nice enough to invite us to Drake and Margot’s wedding (book one’s main characters) even though it didn’t go as smoothly as everyone hoped.
