The Enigma Girls by Candace Fleming book review is written by Greta Masarik (age 15) of the Plumfield Kids

It is 1940 and the people of the small British town of Bletchley can’t help but wonder who all these absent-minded professors and teenaged girls are who just keep pouring in, and what they are up to. What is so secret that they never talk about what they are doing? Or what is so all-encompassing that cyclists, so deep in thought, frequently crash into people? And above all else, what could possibly be happening behind the guarded gates of the local estate, Bletchley Park? One word: Enigma. 

The German Enigma Machines were capable of 159 quintillion different ciphers. Every morning a little after midnight, the Nazis would change the Enigma settings, making it, at least they thought, impossible for the Allies to decipher any intercepted Axis message. But, as in so many things, the Nazis were wrong, and that false assumption proved fatal to them.  

The majority of the staff at Bletchley Park were actually women. From the cryptographers to the indexers, they dominated the park. And more incredible still the vast majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 21. What those young women did was unbelievable. The work of the thousands of Wrens (Women’s Royal Navy) who spent hours working on the hated mechanical computers referred to as the Bombs, was no less impressive than the cryptographers, who every day broke the Enigma setting. 

Decades after the war Enigma was finally declassified, which meant some of the Park’s staff took this secret to their grave. I can only imagine what the husbands of these women must have thought when their wives told them why they were so good at crossword puzzles. 

The Enigma Girls by Candance Fleming tells the story of these unsung heroes, without whom we could never have won the Second World War. Fleming recounts the stories of ten young women working in different steps of the process, from Patricia Owtram who intercepted encrypted Axis messages to Mavis Lever who helped to break the Enigma settings every morning. 

I was a little skeptical of this book when I started. The Enigma Girls is in the Scholastic Focus series, which my family has had some bad experiences with, but I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the writing. It is living and interesting, and the many, many photographs truly bring this story to life.

I read this book in one afternoon (I had the benefit of a very quiet camping trip), and I sincerely hope you enjoy it as much as I did!