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Barone, Rebecca E. F.

Unbreakable: The Spies Who Cracked the Nazis' Secret Code

272 pp. | Holt | October, 2022 | Trade ISBN 9781250814203 $19.99 | Ebook ISBN 9781250814210 $10.99
(1) YA Barone (Race to the Bottom of the Earth, rev. 5/21) delivers another impressive feat of narrative nonfiction storytelling. In the years following World War I, Germany developed a virtually unbreakable code, called Enigma, with the help of a complicated machine. One such machine fortuitously fell into the hands of Poland, enabling their ­codebreakers to duplicate the machine and crack the code--until the Germans added layers of complexity. As Hitler rose to power, the threat of military aggression became obvious, increasing the stakes substantially; the code was central to military operations, particularly the German naval strategy. France, England, and Poland now had extra motivation to cooperate with one another to break the code; and break it they did, but not before an extensive game of ­cat-and-mouse with Germany. Accompanied by occasional ­black-and-white ­photos, Barone's suspenseful text introduces a sprawling cast of characters, with the epilogue updating readers on what happened afterward to the central ­players. A timeline, bibliography, and source notes are appended.
Reviewer: Jonathan Hunt | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2023

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