Wednesday, November 18, 2015

10 Things I Loved About A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan


Farrah is good at math. Really good. As in, she has a gift, good. But all she wants is to be normal, so her friends don't know. Then one night she spots a code embedded in one of the teen shows she watches with her friends and when the code leads her to a terrorist plot, Farrah suddenly finds herself on the run for her life with a young and admittedly cute FBI agent. As the threat to her safety escalates (as well as her attraction to John), Farrah has to let her true self shine or risk losing everything.
So here are my 10 (non-spoilery) Things I Loved about Annabel Monaghan's A Girl Named Digit:

  1. Farrah aka Digit: I really enjoyed her story arc. I totally understood her desire to hold back on her math/pattern intelligence as a way to just get through her senior year of high school, but I appreciated the way her perception of herself (and her friends) grew over the course of the book. I also liked the way both sides of her "gift" were presented - both the positive (the good that was done through applying it) and the negative (the OCD type tendencies she could fall into).
  2. Her parents: I liked the fact that they cared for her and that Digit got along with them as well. It was nice to see a cohesive family unit in a young adult novel.
  3. Her brother, Danny: who is the main person to call her Digit. I liked that the siblings got along okay as well. It was refreshing to not have the tension be in the main character's family for once.
  4. John: I liked the way his character was slowly built throughout the novel. Monaghan did a good job of revealing things just slowly enough to keep the interest going.
  5. John's dad: Cracked me up. I really liked his character, for the short amount of time he was there.
  6. Farrah's friend Olive: Even though she isn't present in much of the book, her character really shone through the brief bits that are there. Enough so that she left an impression and I want to see more of her!
  7. The codes: I've always been fascinated with secret codes and I loved the way they all worked together to crack the various messages and codes to uncover the terrorist plot.
  8. The action: Running for their lives, trying to solve the mystery in time to save people, being betrayed - all made for a quick read as I wanted to find out what happened next!
  9. The camp: Okay, so there are bits of this that are a bit cheesy and a few things about the plot (particularly the very end) that stretch believability a bit. But it's a good and enjoyable kind of cheesy (at least it was for me). It's hard to have a light-hearted romance-y novel that's dealing with a girl running from terrorists who want to torture and kill her, but somehow Monaghan manages to pull it off.
  10. There's a sequel. I'm definitely going to be looking up the next chapter in Digit's adventures.

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