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Mia Hayes is just looking for a summer job and deciding where to attend college when, one night, government agents come to her home. At the end of their intrusion, her mother is dead and her father is on the run. Mia doesn’t understand how her quiet life could have changed so drastically so quickly.
Every year for her birthday, Mia’s father, a fan of codes, cryptology, and the like, makes her a box with puzzles in it for her to solve to get her present. On this devastating night, he gives her that box, a few weeks early. She has to solve its puzzles this time to find out the truth about her parents.
Mia ends up on the run herself, evading the same agents who came to her home. She is aided by a nice young man she meets at a protest in D.C. Their date night turns into a dayslong search for clues together.
Codebreaker is an entertaining book full of action, mystery, a bit of history, and various codes that the authors teach readers. There are a number of spots where the reader is invited to solve the code after having been given sufficient information to do so. It should be a fun interactive exercise for young readers.
This book is categorized as young adult, and it’s one that definitely feels written on that level. I read a lot of young adult books, and usually I don’t feel “excluded” because I’m not a teenager. Sometimes, however, something about the style of the writing feels pitched a bit too “low” or “young” for my tastes. That’s the case with Codebreaker. It just felt a bit closer in tone somehow to middle-grade, so I didn’t fully get into it. That being said, it’s likely a good bet for teen or tween readers.
Rated: Mild. Profanity includes 15 instances of moderate profanity, 25 uses of mild language, and 20 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Tame kisses. Violence pops up fairly frequently; there are a number of mentions of injuries and blood; a character’s parents are killed. These could make the book a bit closer to moderate for younger readers.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
