Sarah Flannery's project earned her Ireland's 1999 Young Scientist of the Year award and the right to compete at the international level with her project. Her story is told in the enthusiastic voice of a teenager, and is inspiring enough. She discovers a potential replacement for the standard public key encryption algorithm, and presents this in her project. She is pursued by all manner of money grubbers, and gets an opportunity to really show her mettle as the story reaches its conclusion. Her accomplishments are a humbling reminder to adults that fresh ideas often come from those who have not been indoctrinated to believe that a thing is impossible. Sarah's project ultimately does not achieve commercial success, but that does not dim her achievement by much.
The presentation of the mathematics underlying cryptography is the river that bears Sarah's science project boat to the sea. You can either lean over the gunwale and plumb the depths or stay in the main cabin and sip champagne. The story doesn't suffer either way. While I am an engineer, I don't find any special joy in spending my spare time on mathematics. I dreaded the duty I felt my profession imposed on me to pay attention to the technical details in this book. But the duty melted into interest as I worked through this introduction to a subject about which I'd previously known nothing at all --- and I have returned to it over and over to delve a little deeper. Readers in the book discussion group were split on whether they enjoyed the mathematics. But all agreed that the story stood up well even if the reader skipped the technical parts.
The book discussion group found this book better than average, but hardly a "must read." It would be a great book to suggest to a select group of high schoolers, boy or girl. We gave it a rating of 3.5 stars.