Title: The Number of Love Series: Codebreakers #1
Author: Roseanna M. White
Published: June 4, 2019
Genre(s): Romance: Historical
Page Count: 370
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Three years into the Great War, England’s greatest asset is their intelligence network—field agents risking their lives to gather information, and codebreakers able to crack every German telegram. Margot De Wilde thrives in the environment of the secretive Room 40, where she spends her days deciphering intercepted messages. But when her world is turned upside down by an unexpected loss, for the first time in her life numbers aren’t enough.
Drake Elton returns wounded from the field, followed by an enemy that just won’t give up. He’s smitten quickly by the too-intelligent Margot, but how to convince a girl who lives entirely in her mind that sometimes life’s answers lie in the heart?
Amidst biological warfare, encrypted letters, and a German spy who wants to destroy not just them, but others they love, Margot and Drake will have to work together to save them all from the very secrets that brought them together.
At the outset of the book, 17-year-old heroine Margot is not interested in marriage or children. She is worried something is “wrong” with her. Enter hero Drake, a man in his mid-twenties. He pursues her until her very clear “no” morphs into acceptance of him as a suitor. By the end of the story, Drake has convinced Margot that it wasn’t that she didn’t want a spouse and children—it was that she was afraid she couldn’t have both a family and a career. But she was wrong, and he (and god!) know best. So they marry.
There are so many horrible things to unpack here, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Number of Love is a very concerning book.
Obviously, a great deal of what goes on in this novel is directed by the fact that it is a religious romance. Everything that happens in this book is informed by the fact that Roseanna M. White is a white, homeschooling Christian lady from the American South, and that she is projecting her own god-experiences onto two Catholic Europeans working as spies during WWI. (I think we can see why this might be problematic.)
As might be expected, The Number of Love clumsily deals with subjects that are beyond this author’s reach. Rather than writing her characters as believably and authentically Catholic, they behave exactly like 21st century American Protestants, just with rosary beads. I don’t speak French, but I do know Spanish, and sections where Drake speaks in Spanish are…not grammatically correct. Worst of all, the author commits one absolutely unforgivable error: she conflates mental illness with divine inspiration.
Margot de Wilde is “not like other girls.” She is a mathematician, unconcerned with fashion or giggling over men. This is, of course, misogynistic code for “I am not like other girls; therefore I am superior.” Yet beyond that, it is undeniable that Margot is not written as simply a brainy introvert; whether the author intended it or not, Margot does not read as neurotypical. Frequent mentions that Margot does not understand others’ emotions, is uncomfortable with physical contact, has difficulty connecting with her peers, and more besides, indicate that she might be on the autism spectrum. (This is not addressed in the text, and I won’t deal with it here either.) More: Margot has what any modern doctor would likely suspect to be OCD. This is where we run into problems.
Margot counts, constantly. This comforts her, makes her feel that the world is ordered. And beyond counting, her mind is constantly besieged by random numbers, equations, or mathematical proofs. These unbidden, unasked-for numbers cause her to do things. All of her decisions are made based on what the numbers tell her to do. According to Margot, these numbers are god’s way of speaking to her.
According to me, that’s bullshit.
If a person genuinely and sincerely believes that a deity speaks to you, fine. If that person believes that god speaks through numbers, also fine. But if a person has all of the mental symptoms that Margot de Wilde does in The Number of Love, and if god’s voice appears to manifest itself in the form of “commands” (the author’s word!), those are not godly directives, those are intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts (please Google them if you’re not familiar), are bad.
When a teenager has numbers flying into her head 24/7, and those numbers are commanding her to behave in certain ways, this is not a sign of god’s presence. It’s a sign of undiagnosed mental illness.
This is illustrated best, I think, by Margot’s character arc throughout this book. One of the numbers god uses to command Margot most often is the number 18. This seems to correspond to a mysterious “Agent Eighteen,” currently spying for the British, but the pattern of 18 emerges frequently throughout Margot’s daily life. Whenever she encounters this number, Margot feels compelled by god to pray for “Agent Eighteen.” One one occasion, Margot is trying to find her mother, but is interrupted by the number 18 filling her head and refusing to leave her alone until she prays for “Agent Eighteen.”
When Margot is done praying and resumes searching for her mother, her mother is dead.
So what we have here is a person stopping in the middle of their daily routine—indeed, stopping in the middle of an important task, in order to heed the “command of god” and pray for a complete stranger. This is a mental illness; this is not divine inspiration. No one can convince me otherwise.
And yes, of course, the death of Margot’s mother and a great many other people are rationalized by the characters via the lens of their religion. For instance, Margot’s prayers on that fateful day might not have saved her mother, but they did save the life of “Agent Eighteen” (who, obviously, ends up being her love interest). That’s fine. Human beings seek explanations for inexplicable things, and Christianity offers a comprehensive and comforting explanation for a great many of life’s mysteries.
Religion and psychology do not often play well together. I believe that in order to write a good book, any author (no matter their relationship with god) must pay close attention to how the brain works—how it actually works, not how unschooled holy men tell us it works. Roseanna M. White did not do so here.
