The Rose Code

Since my New Jersey book club has moved back to zoom meetings for at least the winter, I picked up The Rose Code so I can join them having read the book in January. (In December, their first month back zooming, I joined them but hadn't read whatever they were discussing.)

I've had Kate Quinn's The Alice Network in my list of books to read for quite awhile but hadn't heard of The Rose Code until this book club selected it. It's about women who work together decoding encrypted messages during World War II. I think I might have seen a movie about a group of women doing just that so the historical reality was something in the back of my mind.

Osla, Mab, and Beth first meet when Osla and Mab are billeted in the home of Beth's mother when they are assigned to work at Bletchley Park, at the Government Code & Cypher School. The work is highly secretive and even discussing things amongst each other is considered treasonous. Beth's mother is overbearing and horrible and refers to Beth as "mother's little helper." Beth is also amazing at solving puzzles so Osla and Mab suggest her as an addition to the crew at Bletchley Park. Beth is hired and becomes a top notch decoder. She's always been told that she's good for nothing other than helping her mother and at "BP" she finds her place.

The three women couldn't be more different. Osla is  a society girl, often called a ditzy deb, and in a relationship with the recently deceased Prince Philip prior to his marriage to Queen Elizabeth. I suppose I should say Princess Elizabeth as she had not yet ascended to the throne. Mab has led a hard-scrabbled life and has worked very diligently to elevate her station in life. Beth, the oldest of the three, has lived a very sheltered life. They have different skills, work in different "huts" doing different jobs. The bond together and become extremely close.

Until a betrayal! But who betrayed whom? And how did Beth end up in a sanitarium? The story line jumps back and forth from the war years to the days leading up the Royal Wedding in 1947. I've noticed some reviewers complaining about the jumping back and forth between two timelines, but that's a format that I'm quite comfortable with. In this case, it's what really kept the suspense going.

Many passages in the book were way too technical for me, about the methods and equipment used to decode. It wasn't necessary to understand that. I think the point was that they were doing really difficult work that not everyone is suited to do.

I gave the novel 3 stars on goodreads because it got off to a slow start, not even counting the technical bits that were very often tedious if they ran on too long. But the story was fascinating and the author's note at the end, what characters and parts of the story were highly fictionalized versus actual people and their actual histories. It should make for a good book club discussion.