Code Girls, a young adult novel presented by Liza Mundy recreates a world of our history, clearly taking us through the lives of many female code breakers in the dark era we know as World War II. This nonfiction text takes us on a journey of the time period where women still face extreme gender inequality and they are disregarded. Code Girls sheds a light on the crucial roles that women played during World War II as code breakers, more or less hidden, yet just as essential as men out at war. Although I am often not too keen on reading nonfiction books for they can sometimes be overly factual and not particularly engaging in my eyes, Code Girls was very engaging. With a mixture of story and fact throughout the book, Mundy managed to capture my attention. Mundy establishes an important part of history with both story and informative literary elements following not just a single character’s life throughout the duration of the war, but multiple women who were extremely valuable to the ending of the war. This book teaches you facts and details about how various codes worked, and how cryptanalysis revealed a new world for women in World War II. Below in my blog post, I will expand on what I learnt in the novel, Code Girls.
This page above is a insight I found throughout the novel on the idea that women were suffering during World War II. On this page, I used a mind map layout which provided me with a visually pleasing, easy way to constantly add new information to my main theme in the centre. I wondered what caused this vast pain in these women’s lives, and throughout the book, I discovered that many women were overjoyed to have a purpose in the war even if it was behind the scenes, but nobody wanted the weight of hundreds – even thousands – of lives on their hands. This aligned with my theme that stated that responsibility is not something you can choose. Women constantly felt pressured and scared to mess up because if they failed at their roles, they didn’t want to experience the feeling of guilt and loss if they were unable to achieve their goals. They wanted to help but didn’t want to feel responsible for the consequences of failure. I included quotes and paraphrased details from various parts of the book, and wrote a brief summary about how this theme related to the novel Code Girls in the bubbled, bottom right corner.
The next page contains one of the central ideas I noticed throughout the book. Preceding World War II, women were treated unequally to men, and would not be offered the same opportunities or roles as a man would be. As the war progressed, women were needed, and were given the opportunity to demonstrate their full capabilities for the people who once fully doubted them. Although many began to accept the women in their new roles, some people were still unwilling to rely on the women. These people were seemingly old fashioned, and afraid of the change around them. For this page, I used a more linear format to easily be able to identify the three different quotes on the page, and my thinking behind them and how they relate to the central idea.
This page above was made on Day 8 of our unit, where we analyzed descriptive passages in our novel. In nonfiction novels, not many locations get huge descriptions, but in the moment when you get a detailed passage, the author is likely trying to lead the reader to a deeper meaning, or to visualize what it is like to be in the character’s shoes. My work above shows my noticing of the descriptive words used by Mundy to describe a codebreaking unit, Arlington Hall, which helped to lead me to a central idea about these Code Girls. I began to understand the conditions that these women were in, and created a new central idea that although these women were unknowing and working in inadequate workplaces, they were constantly working hard in the low-grade conditions.
On Day 10 of this nonfiction reading unit, we were most of the ways through our books, and we began to reread our books to discover parts that we may have overlooked, or misunderstood the first time round. Code Girls was during World War II where various battles were fought around the world. As I reread my book, I read a section which covered Battle of the Bulge which I found a little bit odd, because I didn’t read many other detailed passages in the book about other battles. Consequently, I looked up the Battle of Bulge, and my findings led to what is on this page. I came to an understanding that the Battle of the Bulge was a very difficult time in history, and was able to link that idea to the theme I had before that responsibility is not something you can choose. This page uses a format that is similar to cause and effect which allows the viewer to follow the progression of my thinking.
During the unit of Stranger Than Fiction, we constantly referred to a mentor text, Hidden Figures, which covers very similar topics to those of Code Girls. If you aren’t particularly interested in nonfiction books like I am but would like to pick up an historical novel, I would recommend reading Code Girls because while it is informative, it also features the stories of people’s lives in a tale-like manner.
Overall, I really appreciated the well thought out ideas that were presented in the literary novel of Code Girls. My note taking during this unit was extremely beneficial to my understanding behind the genuinely amazing feats of the codebreakers. This book gives you an uncommon insight on the extremely hard working women during World War II, and the author, Liza Mundy, exhibits how they truly were hidden heroes in our historic world.