The Bletchley Riddle

Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin's The Bletchley Riddle is a wartime mystery for 11 year olds about a brother and sister caught up in the secret world of codebreaking.

What happens

It's May 1940 and Britain is waiting to be invaded. Lizzie Novis is fourteen and supposed to be sailing to her gran in America. Instead she marches her chaperone round Liverpool until his feet blister, leaves him soaking them in the cabin, and races off the ship just before it leaves.

She's a fantastic narrator. She's nosy, bossy, very funny and absolutely determined. She also flatly refuses to believe that their mother, Willa, was killed on a work trip to Poland just as the war began.

Her brother Jakob is nineteen and a maths whizz, and he hasn't answered her letters in months. That's because he's been recruited to Bletchley Park to help crack German codes, and he's sworn to secrecy on pain of treason. The last thing he needs is a sister who says everything out loud.

The chapters swap between the two of them, and the way they misread each other is half the fun. Jakob thinks Lizzie is a nuisance. Lizzie thinks Jakob has turned horrid. Really, they're both frightened.

Then Lizzie finds something hidden under the floorboards of her mother's wardrobe. It's a small leather diary with a tiny lock and papers folded inside, and she doesn't tell Jakob.

There are riddles all the way through, starting with a brilliant one on the very first page about how you'd smuggle a message past soldiers who've searched every inch of you. Real codebreakers like Alan Turing are glimpsed at the Park. A boy called Nigel spends his days up a tree watching for Nazi spies. Could anyone there be one? It certainly feels that way.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It's a war story, so there's worry and grief running through it, mostly about a missing parent. There's a little mild swearing, and a few jokes about upset tummies that are ruder than you might expect.

If your reader loves a puzzle as much as a story, this is a treat.

What to read next

Hungry for more wartime secrets? Jennifer A Nielsen's Rescue follows Meg in occupied France, secretly helping the resistance with her plans scrambled into anagrams in a hidden journal, while she waits for news of her missing father.