Journal Entry 1 by KateKintail from Burke, Virginia USA on Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Bought at a library book sale.

At the NSA (just a stone's throw from where I live) the ultimate code has been found and is running around the best code-breaking computer in the world. It could change the world of cryptography as we all know it. On many levels, people scramble to control this code and keep it a secret... and, at the same, also try to figure out what the heck is happening as twists and turns they hadn't counted on are thrown at them.

My favorite character was easily poor David, who is racing around Spain trying to recover a crucial part of the key to cracking and using the code... only he (like everyone else) doesn't have the whole story.

My mother (who read this before me) says she didn't like the ending at all. I'll admit the ending wasn't the best, but at least it didn't have a simple, happy, easy solution. The layers of complication are fun to watch unravel, as we try to crack the code along with the chracters.

Things I didn't like so much: While there was action and mystery, I felt like Dan tried to hard to make the story mysterious and complicated. Some of the twists were incredible, while I could see others coming a mile away. And if he mentioned the lurker in the wire-rim glasses one more time, I was going to go insane.
Also, the NSA isn't as secret to me as Dan wanted it to be. I have met NSA officials and I've had friends in college who went to work for the NSA. I can't imagine how people, even back in 1998, would think this agency was as mysterious as Dan wants it to be (or not even know about it in the first place). As a computer scientist who took an entire year of cryptography classes as a graduate student, I enjoyed the setting and plot because I knew so much about it and love that world... but I found it either too fictional or way too basic for me. (For example, I didn't need pages to explain what a brute force algorithm is or tell the story of the origins of a computer bug). Someone without my technical and mathematical background would probably enjoy it in a much different way. But I did love the realism of the geeky, brilliant characters in "my world". It's a fine line for me, but this is all the reason it got 8 stars from me instead of 10.

I enjoyed it, especially David's plotline. 

Journal Entry 2 by KateKintail at Giant Food (6011 Burke Centre Pkwy) in Burke, Virginia USA on Sunday, April 13, 2008

Released 4 yrs ago (4/13/2008 UTC) at Giant Food (6011 Burke Centre Pkwy) in Burke, Virginia USA

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

RELEASE NOTES:

Left in a shopping cart in a parking lot carousel

Released for the 2008 Leap Into the Wild 366 Challenge & a Secret Sunset Mission

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