Rating: Not Recommended (casual sex and drug use)

This one wasn’t written for kids, per se, but you have to be careful because it has heaps of potentially educational content, so it could be recommended to your older kids. But the substance abuse and the casual sex are such that I certainly don’t recommend it.

To be clear: I want to warn parents about this one. The book is dangerous because it has some really awesome explanations of cryptoanalysis, and a few bits of interesting history described in an accessible way. This means that a well-meaning person might recommend it to your teenager because they remember those bits, but don’t realize how bad the other bits are.

To make matters worse, with respect to some of the drug abuse and sex, Scarlett Thomas is able to weave in some hopeful character choices that seem promising. These resolutions mean it would be easy for someone to forget about the dark bits and remember that “its not so bad in the end,” and to chalk up the casual sex and the drug use as simply being part of our culture. Someone might be dismissive of the potential damage that this book could do to a kid who likes math/science/cryptology.

I acknowledge I have a history of being naïve with regard to sex before I was married, and I am still naïve regarding drugs. But this book had about 5 odd casual sex images I didn’t need and that are hard to shake from my head. If I had these powerful images swimming in my brain before getting married, it would have deeply distorted my ideas of what sex is all about. I wish I had thought to skip them, but they were so oddly situated in an otherwise interesting book that I was caught off guard. For someone who struggles with drugs, again you just don’t need all the substance use that is offered.

In particular, when the main character tells her history, she eventually gets to her early college age, where she and her best friend use drugs and lose their virginity in a corner of a party, repeat this behavior, and after an abortion and some other trauma are able to snap out of it. Even later though, (after “coming to her senses”), she still gets high and has sex against a tree with a mysterious almost-stranger. There are other close shaves with her boss’s boss’s boss. It’s just gross.

Bottom line: Be careful. The mathematics and cryptoanalysis offered is incredibly intriguing and educational, so a well-meaning person might recommend this book. For some it’s the world we live in, so they will be numb to the dangerous, unhealthy model that unfortunately is intertwined throughout.