A Girl Named Digit
September 12, 2020
A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan is one a non-mainstream
book that I recently read because it was spy-themed ish. I had a
spy themed phase after the Gallagher Girls so this was one of the
related books I wanted to try. Just to preface this, some of those
related spy themed books (like the Naturals) were pretty good.
This one, however, was not.
This book follows Farrah “Digit” Higgins who’s some kind of math
genius trying to blend into high school. She accidently unlocks a
code of a terrorist group (the code was on a SOAP OPERA. Why!?)
and then is pulled into a kidnapping plot with the FBI and helps
try to bring down said terrorist agency.
My first problem with this book is that for some reason Farrah
seems unusually self-conscious of her high SAT scores. She says “I
have a gift for math and patterns and puzzles. I had a perfect
score on the math SAT, the math subject test, and the AP Calculus
exam, and I had the highest score in the country on the National
Gifted Math Students Exam. I’m going to MIT in the fall.”
While some of those accomplishments are certainly impressive, her
SAT scores and AP Calc score aren’t very uncommon at all. In fact,
the only one of those that would qualify her status as a genius
would be the highest score in the country one. I’m not sure how
the National Gifted Math Students Exam works (I looked it up and
didn’t really find anything), but to be first in the country, I
don’t think it just relies on natural talent, it probably requires
a ton of hard work which I don’t see Farrah doing, especially
because she spent her high school years trying to hide her gift.
A more obvious problem is Farrah’s romantic interest in the book.
The FBI agent assigned to her, John, is 21! And she’s 17! It’s a
bit illegal and weird. I didn’t really like the chemistry between
them because for most of the book he basically rejects her and
says he has no feelings for her (because she’s a minor). And then
in the last quarter of the book he just like randomly forgets all
that I guess.
Also, the whole terrorist organization is attacking us and we need
Farrah to decode didn’t really work in this book. First of all,
the terrorist organization left them alone for so long—it didn’t
even seem like they were in any real danger. And in the climax of
the book is when Farrah decodes this really important code that
will help save lives. That’s great, except the code is related to
a Caesar Cipher!!! We wrote a program to break those in Intro to
CS, so like why doesn’t the FBI just use a computer to crack the
code instead of trusting a teenage girl to break it.
The book wasn’t clever enough to pass off as a mystery book. It
wasn’t exciting enough to pass off as a spy book. And the romantic
aspect was just cringey too.