Representation: Black major character, side Asian character
Trigger warnings: Physical illness, bullying
Score: Seven points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.

This was a book that was part of the library reading challenge of the month. The goals were to read a poetry book, a graphic novel and a horror book. This meets the first goal.
I picked this up from one of the two libraries I regularly go to and since I read almost all the poetry books there they didn't leave me much choice except to read this and here's the thing: I like poetry books. But not all. I mean in this case the story itself and the concept was alright and I enjoyed reading that but the execution... Passable at best. Incomprehensible, repetitive, even unimaginative at worst. I don't think poetry works here especially when it looked like someone pressed the Enter key a bunch of times and called it "poetry." If I understood Java which is a significant part of the novel I would have enjoyed it more, I've used C++, Python and even HTML but not Java. It's a shame that the programming parts look like gibberish to me.

The novel starts with the main character Emmy whose last name or even race I don't know (is she white? Black? There are two girls on the cover and I can't tell which is which.) Emmy moved to San Francisco from Wisconsin and then goes to a new school where she has to choose her electives but she is all alone in her new school presumably because all her friends are at her old school and she has no way to contact them, wait isn't Emmy 12? Is she one of the few people who don't use social media, texts, or even letters? Emmy told me she loved music but she's bad at it and then she is shocked when there is a computer science elective (I think it's the American equivalent of Digital Technologies since where I live schools use that term) and then she meets this new friend Abigail but soon enough that relationship doesn't pan out well. This book was originally called Emmy in the Key of Code but they changed the title, strange.

After a few pages sprinkled with some music jargon another character comes in, Ms Delaney and soon enough Emmy starts to program- I mean code. I don't get how Abigail being a good singer and part of the choir has anything to do with Emmy and I think she remains alone for the entire book, is it that hard to make new friends or is she clinging on to the past, by the way Francis was supposed to be a bully but I didn't see that since all I saw was this guy who was frustrated at his computer and even mistreated it once. The book mentioned Fortran, old computers, women in computing and even artificial intelligence but it was talking about mind uploads and not things like ChatGPT though I can forgive that since that didn't exist when the book was published. The latter half would've been more intriguing if the writing was more... accessible since here the code takes over, why the double ampersands (&&), double vertical lines (||) and curly brackets- I mean braces ({})? Alongside the other programming jargon, it's so hard to comprehend. Ms Delaney gets sick due to a chronic illness but simultaneously Emmy was working on her project which was shown towards the last few pages in the theatre and several events happen: one, Abigail became Emmy's friend again after not talking to her for a while and two, she sings the Java code song and spontaneously others join in and... That's it. Wait what? That ending left me lost for words.

On a side note I've seen books like this before like Hello Ruby by Linda Liukas and even a show called The Solutioneers but at least this is unique since it's all in poetry. ( )

This is almost a verse novel in that the entire story is set out like you are writing lines of Java code. 12 Year old Emmy and her parents have just moved to a new city so that Emmy's dad can get his "big break"playing piano in one of the orchestras. Emmy's Mum is an opera singer who has decided to take on an office job to support the father's dreams. Emmy starts a new school that has electives and meets a girl called Abigail in the coding class that she and 4 other boys attend. The class is run by the eccentric but very talented Ms Delaney. Ms Delaney's students are so taken with learning Java script that they start coming in at lunchtime for extra classes. Emmy and Abigail become friends BUT only in Computer class as Abigail pretends that she was put in the class by mistake to fit in with all her music minded friends. Emmy is somewhat shunned because she has no musical talent whatsoever and fainted the last time she had to sing a solo.
A funny, heartwarming book about being true to yourself when others have different expectations of you. I liked the "fairy tale"back stories to all the main characters as they filled in details of why some characters were acting certain ways and also made you, the reader, realize along with Emmy that everyone has their own back story. ( )