Liza Mundy’s Code Girls was a rollick through the WWII-era American military industrial complex’s recruitment of predominantly young educated women from women’s colleges to work on code-breaking. Following one cohort of these women particularly, but taking an expansive view of the effort, the book moves at a pert pace through multiple geographies that span the inner lives of the women who Mundy gets to know most intimately and through the wide Pacific and wartime geopolitics. There’s some technology and math talk, which I love, glimpses into the internecine Army/Navy relationship, exploration of American urbanization in the post-Depression era, and some truly laugh-out-loud descriptions of the women’s experiences who worked hard to stay ahead of the enemy’s communications even as they played even sometimes harder. Code Girls is never heavy, but will stand out as an exhaustively researched work that rewards the curious reader on almost every page. 4/5.
There’s a lot of praise circulating for the English translation of Kevin Lambert’s May Our Joy Endure, available now in paperback. I could appreciate the pomo satire and more than a dollop of gentrification talk made this a bit of a busman’s holiday. Like many English Canadians – or at least non-Québecois readers – some of the sprinkling of French thinkers went over my head, but a passing familiarity with the tensions of the Quiet Revolution will assist in getting the gist. There’s definitely some delight to be taken in the skewering of Montréal’s moneyed class even if some of the parody is likely lost on those like me for whom the novel is an exercise in reading someone else’s navel-gazing: not my gaze, not my navel. The writing is absolutely a step above the popular and verges occasionally on literary, but it’s young. Let’s blame the translation. The cancellation of a star architect seems a stretch, but my guess is that the Allophones of Québec’s cultural capital will greatly enjoy this very current and on-point work. 3/5
