By Stacia Deutsch
A girl joins her school's new coding club and has to crack a string of mysterious coded messages to figure out who's leaving them.
Lucy signs up for the after-school coding club the second it opens, because she has a plan: she wants to build an app for someone she loves. Then the actual coding turns out to be slower and less magical than she pictured, her friendships start wobbling, and mysterious coded notes begin showing up in her locker. Figuring out who's sending them, and learning to work with the other girls instead of racing ahead of them, turns out to be the real puzzle. It's a friendship story with real coding woven through it.
This is the shelf's easiest true chapter book, short and fast, built for a child who loves computers but isn't a big reader yet. The coding is real but light, so nobody has to already know anything, and the heart of it is friendship, which pulls in a child who'd otherwise say a coding book sounds like homework. It's the first of a series, so a child who likes Lucy has a whole stack waiting, and it comes from the actual Girls Who Code organization, which makes the club on the page feel like one your child could really join.