In The Key Of Code

Emmy has just started at a new school, in a new town, and feels very out of tune with her surroundings. Her parents are both accomplished professional musicians, and though Emmy has been taking lessons for years and is passionate about music, she just doesn’t have their talent for performing it.

Fate, though, finds a place for her in the Introduction to Computer Programming class, helmed by the fantastic Ms Delaney who is keen to share her love of programming with her students and give them all the tools they’ll need to create programs for themselves. One of Emmy’s fellow programmers is the very popular Abigail whose friends think she was assigned a place by accident, but is that really true?

Lucido’s verse novel is an absolute joy, deftly creating real and well-rounded characters with relatively few words. Emmy is by turns buoyed by her passions and the support of her parents and crushed by her own insecurity and by the unkindness of her classmates. It’s a novel steeped not only in feminism but also in the joy of the arts and science and finding links between the two. It’s also a story about the complicated nature of friendships and how sometimes we need to see things from a different perspective to truly understand what is going on. This novel may not change your life, but it will challenge you to think about trying something new.