Monday 22 May 2017

A Girl Named Digit

Finished May 16
A Girl Named Digit by Annabel Monaghan

This teen novel features Farrah Higgins, nicknamed Digit for her interest and skills in math. After encountering a difficult social situation at school, Digit has attended a high school in a new area of town where only the teachers and administration are aware of her skills, and she hides them from her peers to fit in. She is also seeing a therapist to help her manage her tendency towards obsessive-compulsiveness. Now in senior year, she hangs out with a group of girls she has been friends with the first year of high school. One day when they are watching a popular show together, she notices a series of numbers at the bottom of the screen, When she sees a different set of numbers the following week, and a third set the week after that, she can't keep herself from trying to analyze some sort of meaning from them. She finds them to be a reverse Fibonacci followed by a 911. She tries to figure out various meanings from the 911, One of them is the election of JFK as president on November 9th. At school the next day, her teacher tells them about an airport bombing at JFK airport.
Sure that she is on to something, Digit races home to tell her dad, who is a math professor at UCLA. He discounts the connection, but is willing to take her to the local FBI to make a report.
Digit gets frustrated when they don't take her seriously there, and decides to do a little sleuthing of her own, but she isn't prepared for the danger she puts herself in, and must find someone to help her.
Her second trip to the FBI is more dramatic, and she gets assigned a minder, but she finds herself distracted by the young FBI agent, and they find themselves running from dangerous men more than once as they work toward the people behind the terrorist scheme.
I really liked the character in the book as she discovers that being herself is a lot easier than hiding who she really is, and she finds that she has only looked at the surface of many of the people around her as well. Both a thriller and a coming of age novel, I found this a fun read.

2 comments:

  1. I love this book! Digit is such a great character. The second book about her is not quite as good as this one, but it is still a fun read. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Lark. I saw there was a second book and I wondered. I definitely like her as a character. And I liked the twist at the end regarding the other girls, too.

      Delete