Crack the Code

Twelve-year-old Emmy feels out of place at her new school. She likes music, but she can’t find the courage to sign up for choir. Then Emmy begins a computer-science class. She befriends a girl named Abigail, and together, they learn how to code. They create websites by writing instructions for a computer.

Emmy in the Key of Code is a novel in verse, or a book-length poem that tells a story. In the book, Emmy struggles to make room for all her interests. “She is trying to figure out if she’s a musician or a coder, or whether she can do both,” author Aimee Lucido told TIME for Kids.

Lucido can relate. She’s a writer as well as a software engineer, and she loves to play piano. “In this book, I was trying to bridge the gap between music, code, and poetry,” she says.