This was a page-turner! I’m usually reading about eight books at a time, but when I find a good one, I set all the others aside to finish it–and that’s what I did with this one. It helped that I had both the audio and the kindle version whisper-synced, so I could go back and forth.
The story follows Cat in the post-WWII late 1940s. Cat was on track to follow the typical life trajectory for a woman in those days, but she walked out on her would-be husband on their wedding day when she found out that she’d been recruited to Arlington Hall, to join the team of code-breakers assigned to the Russian unit. One blot on her “record” nearly kept her from joining the team: the existence of an uncle she’d never met, brother of her late mother, who had joined the Communist Party. But they accept her anyway, and she makes great friends with the other women on the team, as well as several of the quirky male characters too. Soon, her path crosses again with a handsome man she knew from her one Harvard co-ed codebreaking class, though: Jonathan, a former rival for the top spot in class.
The romance between them is very well written, and paced perfectly amid the process of unraveling the secret code names of the Soviet spies who sold atomic secrets from the Americans. Eventually this gets very personal, as Cat gets too close to some of the spies on the inside, and they choose to frame her instead, using her Communist uncle as a pretext. She knows the stakes are high, as she’s told from day one at Arlington that if she betrays what she knows, she’ll be executed for treason.
I was a little annoyed at how quickly Cat and Jonathan hopped into bed once the tension reached that point–really? Isn’t that a bit anachronistic? I know it *happened,* but not nearly so casually as all that back then, I wouldn’t have thought. There were a few other modern values sprinkled here and there too which annoyed me more, given the historical setting. But aside from that, it was a great read!
My rating: ****1/2
Language: none
Violence: none
Sexual content: present, but skip-able (and I did)
Political content: present, but minor (even though it felt out of place in an historical novel)
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