I loved the way it gave history to a woman I was thought the name of and a few sentences before but never really took the time to learn more about.

Dreaming in Code is a book about Ada Lovelace.  If you don't know, Ada was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and is considered the first computer programmer. (A female? gasp!)  Ada found out that she was better at work than motherhood and really enjoyed Math and Science.  I am familiar with her names because ADA is a programming language that is still used today at my job and Lovelace is thrown around with the AI debate.  It was a lot of fun to learn more about her and how she died with gambling debts and sold the family jewels to pay the bookkeepers.   Ada passed away when she was 36 years old but obviously her work in the STEM fields are still showing impacts today.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

It is as shame that Ada Lovelace is not yet a household name. The daughter of Lord Byron, she was a scientist and scientific thinker in her own right during the mid-1800s. I loved that this book included images and diagrams alongside the biographic details of Ada's life. I will definitely be adding this book to our library collection!

I love Ada Lovelace and McCully does justice to the computing pioneer's bittersweet life story. A very moving book.

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the celebrated and notorious poet Lord Byron, was one of the world's first computer programmers. Ada had a very unusual upbringing. Her mother left Lord Byron when Ada was just a baby and took a very strict approach to her daughter's education. Ada's education far exceeded that of most girls of her time. She had a succession of tutors and proved to be very gifted at mathematics. After meeting Charles Babbage at the age of 17, she and the inventor collaborated and exchanged ideas. His knowledge of inventing and machinery married with her knowledge of mathematics far outstripped the technology of the day.

I really enjoyed this brief biography of Ada Byron Lovelace. It's a very fast and engaging read. Ada Lovelace is a fascinating person, and her life was so usual and in many ways very tragic. All of that was conveyed very well in Emily Arnold McCully's book.

Ada Byron Lovelace is fascinating. She was an incredibly smart person who ignored labels and limitations forced onto women of her time. Author & illustrator Emily Arnold McCully says that “Brave girls and women are her favorite topics.” Oh, how Lovelace fits that ideal.

While this book is exceedingly informative, I was a bit disappointed in its execution. McCully filled her pages with everything you would ever want to know about Lovelace, including a few end-of-life details that I was surprised to learn about her, her husband, and her mother.

Maybe because I came into it thinking it was a children’s book (read: picture book), I felt slightly frustrated by how it read more like a (beautifully achieved) textbook than a kidlit biography. The cover even threw me by giving the impression it was aimed more at elementary school readers, rather than the late middle/early high school for which it was clearly intended.

Overall, very well written and researched book...just not what I had been looking for at the time.

A big thank you to Candlewick Press & NetGalley for the digital edition to read and review.

Dreaming in Code is a nuanced biography that shows both the good and the bad about Ada Lovelace and her life. A little detail that bugged me was that I felt this was more of a YA biography rather than a biography suitable for young children.

I did enjoy the book and found it a fascinating read; but, yes, there is unfortunately a couple of buts here. While the book states it is for middle-grade students, there are some parts of it that seem either too dry, or too raw, or meant for more older audiences (on the other hand, some of the popular middle-grade fiction also touch on similar topics)

Somehow, the focus seems to be on the misery of her life (and even that of her mother's) than on the 'dreaming in code' part of her life. Granted, I learned a lot about the how, what, when, and why of Ada's progresses in STEM at a time when #STEM for women was practically not even the tip of a bud, but the tone of the book seemed to leaned towards the emotion aspect continuing on the above statement.

But don't get me wrong, this is a book people who want to learn about Ada's life in general should read!
The book does have its pros that include:
a) As I mentioned earlier as well: about what I did learn of her progresses in STEM.
b) The book is truly rich in the additional materials books offer at the end. This one has a plethora of resources - the citations, references, the illustrations and the photographs
c) And the icing on the cake kind of resources in the rich glossaries - of Ada's notes, and more.

Overall, this is a 3.5 stars for me. Better suited for kids older than 13 years of age (and those who want to learn about Ada in general).

Disclaimer: Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the digital review copy of this book.

Ada Byron Lovelace had the misfortune of having a famous father (Lord Byron) who abandoned her and her mother when Ada was only one month old. Despite the immense disadvantages of her childhood and gender, Ada was determined to learn all she could in the fields of math and science.

Dreaming in Code is good bridge for middle school readers ready for a longer biography. At 176 pages, it probably won't be read in one sitting. I would caution parents that it does deal with some mature topics. The descriptions of Ada's work may also be a bit challenging for readers to understand. While overall it was interesting to learn about Ms. Lovelace, her life was rather tragic and her gender did pose significant challenges when it came to being fully accepted in the worlds of math and science.

Emily Arnold McCully has tackled a difficult topic and made it accessible for middle and high school readers. I think students today should be made aware of the female pioneers who paved the way for future generations.

Disclaimer: I received a free digital copy of Dreaming in Code from NetGalley for the purpose of review.

Some good well-written books appeal to select audiences, and Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer by Emily Arnold McCully is one of these. With the names of her father Lord Byron to appeal to English majors and her friend Charles Babbage to computer nerds, her story has an appeal to those two groups. Education emphasis on STEM learning adds yet another group to her audience. In my opinion, the book is of the most interest to middle grade and older students because of its vocabulary and the advantage that prior knowledge will serve in understanding its story.

With that said, in an interesting biography, Ada Byron was born to Anne Isabella Byron and Lord George Gordon Byron on January 15, 1816 and was barely a month old when her mother fled London with her. Her controlling mother had her tutored and raised her in isolation, keeping her from any meaningful contact with her father. Within this confinement, Ada developed a love for math, science, and mental posers.

As was expected of her in that day, Ada was presented to society as eligible for marriage at seventeen. While she performed as expected at this debut, she had much more interest in meeting Charles Babbage a month later. An already famous inventor and mathematician who was a year older than her mother, the two formed a friendship that would continue between two people who were equally quirky. While Ada would eventually become a wife and mother, her work with Babbage as a pioneer in the information age becomes her call to fame.

One more group can be added to this select audience for this book – those who are captivated by biographies of dysfunctional families. With double college majors in English and science and a love of unusual biographies, I found the book fascinating.

I think this was a very well-researched biography and I really liked how the author didn’t shy away from Ada’s less appealing traits, and instead presented the reader with an objective, nuanced picture of both the woman and the mathematical genius.

Ada Lovelace was such a remarkable woman, but sadly she didn’t get nearly enough recognition for her groundbreaking work while she was alive and even today she’s left to linger in men’s shadows too much, I think. I really enjoyed discovering more about her and think this book is an excellent way to learn more about this fascinating, truly extraordinary historical figure.

I was very much struck by how sad and constricted her life was growing up. I was especially astounded by the behavior of her controlling and rather cold-hearted, even cruel, mother. I’d have liked there to have been a bit more focus on Ada as a wife and mother, but the dearth of material might have made that difficult to do and Ada’s focus also seems to have been more on her research rather than her personal life.

This is not a story with a happy ending and I was quite saddened to discover that not only did Ada die young, but also after suffering a lot of pain, in isolation, and with only the very dubious “comfort” of her mother. I was appalled by the latter’s lack of respect for Ada’s final wishes.

This was a very enlightening book. The author presented her findings in a clear way while also keeping it an enjoyable and fluent read.
Absolutely recommend.

My predominant feeling after having read this book is sadness. This emotional response is a proof of how well-written and engaging this book is.
Ada was a creative, imaginative, happy and cheerful child who was born into a very dysfunctional family. Her mother left Ada’s father when she was a tiny baby, so Ada never knew him. Lady Byron herself might have been fiercely intelligent and dedicated to good works, but how little love and affection she gave her daughter! Ada had a gruelling study schedule, designed to develop her mind and stifle her overactive imagination and mercurial disposition.
The book covers well Ada’s most important relationships in life, including that with Mary Somerville, a brilliant mathematician, and Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical machine (a rudimentary prototype of a computer). Ada’s collaboration with Babbage resulted in Ada coming up with her famous ideas and concepts. Alan Turing called one of these ‘Lady Lovelace’s objection’- the idea that artificial intelligence is limited to what the machine is told to do by the human.
The book does not shy away from difficult moments in Ada’s life: drug addiction, gambling, living up ( and down, after all, everybody expected scandal from the daughter of the notorious troublemaker poet), her awful death. It renders perfectly Ada’s feeling restless and limited in what she can achieve by life and by her being a woman. I was shocked at the little detail of Ada and Mary Somerville not being able to use the scientific library, despite the fact that there was a bust of Mary Somerville, prominent mathematician, inside the building.
So much potential, so much craving for knowledge!
I would strongly recommend this well-researched book to any school library. It would make an excellent springboard for discussion in class on a number of points: artificial intelligence, inventions, progress, education, women’s rights.

Thank you to NetGalley and Candlewick Press for the ARC provided in exchange for an honest review.

I was unfamiliar with Ava Byron Lovelace's role in the development of modern-day computing prior to reading Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer, and I found this book absolutely fascinating.

Ada is the daughter of Lord Byron (famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad and dangerous to know") and his wife Anne Isabella (Annabella), who I would describe simply as the worse mother imaginable. "She was fashioning a career out of having suffered at Lord Byron's hands, while at the same time basking in the aura of his fame."

Annabella gave Ava an exhaustive education in mathematics, geometry, calculus and science in order to counter Lord Byron's perceived "insanity," and in an era where women were generally lightly educated or sent to a boarding school to be "reformed" in her youth as experienced by Mary Fairfax Somerville (an acclaimed mathematician and astronomer), the breadth and depth of Ava's education was truly a wonderful gift. But Annabella treated her daughter like a troublesome child her entire life and ran roughshod over her feelings. Ava was truly afraid of her mother and never shared a mother/child relationship with her. I thought McCully's book did an excellent job of conveying the positive and the (many, many) negatives of Lady Byron's childrearing philosophy, especially in a work geared for the young reader.

Ava's life was not an easy or happy one, but her understanding of Charles Babbage's research on his Analytical Engine was light years ahead at the time and her contribution to the world of science is undeniable. The author explains in clear terms for the layperson the significance of Ava's contribution. Ava was the one to "master the complexity, and more important, the potential of Babbage's invention."

"This was Ada's great leap of imagination and the reason we remember her with such admiration. Her idea that the engine could do more than compute, that numbers were symbols and could represent other concepts, is what makes Babbage's engine a proto-computer."

I give "Dreaming in Code" 4.5 stars and highly recommend it.

This book is supposed to be a middle-grade biography of Ada Lovelace. However, with its use of words like "mercurial" "spendthrift," it did not seem to be written mainly at a middle school reading level. Also, some of the phrasings came off weird and more suited to an adult-level book (Possibly YA):

"Henceforth, [Lady Byron[ would perform charitable acts that displayed her religious zeal."
"It didn't take long for Ada to be drawn into a shadowy betting syndicate, one that included John Crosse."

Frustratingly, that passage that I just quoted is the only time I remember seeing the name John Crosse, and there is no explanation of who he is or why McCully brings him up.

That being said, I do think this book works well as a biography of Ada Lovelace. It talks about her lack of a relationship with her father, Lord Byron. It goes into plenty of detail about her relationship with her calculating, cruel, mother, and Charles Babbage is very present. I do wish I'd gotten to hear more about Mrs. Somerville, but otherwise, I thought the book represented Lovelace's life interestingly and well, if not at the reading level that I was expecting.

This well researched biography tells about the first computer programmer in the world, Ada Byron Lovelace. Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, the famous poet, but her mother chose to raise her on science and mathematics to combat the influence of her father's heritage. The details of her course of study and relationship with her mother are covered, as well as her meeting with Charles Babbage and his ideas about a Difference Engine and an Analytical Engine. Combining the creativity of her father and her logical training, Ada developed the idea of cards to program the engines - even to do sequences and loops.

Photos of the Difference Engine, portraits of Ada and her parents, even copies of pages from her school exercise books all add to the text. An appendix includes the notes Ada made as she translated the original article about Babbage's Difference Engine. A second appendix includes the notes from the British Association for the Advancement of Science as they debated whether to fund the construction of the Analytical Engine. There are also extensive source notes for all the quotes within the text, a glossary, and bibliography.

This is recommended for ages 10 -14. Details about Lovelace's gambling and laudanum use, among other facts, will be better understood by readers beyond the elementary grades.

Ada Lovelace seems to be experiencing something of a resurgence of popularity the last few years, and her story is a fascinating one. This biography, classified as children's non-fiction, does an excellent job of setting out the facts of her life and explaining what made her unique and why she is relevant today. The narrative of her life is fairly comprehensive but simply explained, covering even the scandals and the controversy of her family life but in a way that's age-appropriate.

As a children's book (or maybe more like a young teenager's book?) I think it would be most successful with kids who already have a fairly robust interest in math and/or computers. It's not overly complicated, but it does get into some specifics about Charles Babbage's difference engine and analytical engine, and Ada's calculations, which amount to the first computer program on record 100 years before computers. The book definitely doesn't dumb anything down, especially in the Appendix. It would be a fantastic read for girls interested in the STEM fields. With the early training that's available these days for kids to learn how to code, this book is perfectly timed for the young generation.

I really wanted to love this book more than I did. I enjoyed learning about Ada Byron Lovelace. She is someone that deserves to be known but I suppose because of the title of this book I expected more biographical narrative than the flowy, often dramatic passages we got. I swear at times I felt that this book was attempting to pull a Lady Caroline in trying to write like Lord Byron. Some of the passages were dramatic when Ada's life was amazing in and of itself. I don't think more needed to be added to what Ada's life was already given us. It truly was a joy to read about her life. I loved that this book pushed me to learn more about Ada's life and that it gave us a great insight into her upbringing and life.

I really enjoyed this short biography of Ada Lovelace, a near contemporary of Jane Austen, who is commonly described as the world's first computer programmer. It goes into sufficient detail to give you a good picture of her life, but not so much that it gets bogged down. There are images of some of the main characters involved in her life to provide a visual, and the text is a swift and informative read.

Lovelace was beset by a matching pair of bad parents in that one was way too loose and the other way too strict - to puritanical levels. She never knew her father in any meaningful sense because she never really met him. Her mother took her from him at a very early age, got custody - which was unusual for a mother back then, and she never let Ada know who her father was until after he had died, by which time Ada had sort of figured it out for herself. That said her mother was very liberal in terms of getting her daughter an education, which was extremely unusual back then.

Ada had some flighty impulses, but constantly either had them reined in or reined them in of her own accord. She was an avid scholar of many disciplines and excelled at math, which brought her into Babbage's sphere when she became interested in his difference engine at the tender age of seventeen. The rest is quite literally history. Ada died quite young. I commend this story as a very worthy read about a strong female character who happens to have been real, not fictional!

Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer
by Emily Arnold McCully
Candlewick Press
Candlewick
Children's Nonfiction
Pub Date 12 Mar 2019


I am reviewing a copy of Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer through Candlewick Press and Netgalley:

Ada Byron Lovelace was born out of scandal in the early nineteenth century. Ada has an unusual upbring even in nineteenth Century standings. Her Mother was strict and worked hard at making sure every one knew that she was the long suffering ex wife of poet Lord Byron. Ada was raised in isolatio, but was tutored by some of the brightest minds of her time. Ada developed a love for Mental puzzles as well mathematic conundrums and scientific discovery. Lord Byron died in 1824 when Ada was still a you child.


In 1829 Ada came down with the measles and was put on bed rest. The measles turned into a far more serious illness, leaving Ada una to walk for close to two and a half years. No one was cer what caused the illness or what it was but some believed it may have been caused by prolonged bed rest.




By 1832 Ada was well enough to get back to horseback riding, dancing and gymnastics.


At the age of seventeen Ada met the eccentric inventor Charles Babbage, they were kindred spirits. Their colloborations resulted in ideas that predated computer programming by almost 200 years.

Ada Lovelace is now known as a pioneer and prophet of the Information Age.


I give Dreaming in Code five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

“Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer” by Emily Arnold McCully is an inspiring, illuminating and illustrative biography of Ada Byron Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer. Ada was the only child of England’s Romantic poet, Lord George Gordon Byron and Lady Anne Isabella Noel Byron. Ada had large dancing eyes, dark curly hair and a curious, eager and exploring nature. Vivacious and versatile, she was talented at drawing, passionate about music, proficient in languages, with a mind for logic and mechanics. Ada had a mercurial yet resilient temperament, a buoyant exuberance and enthusiasm, piqued with curiosity.

As a precocious child, Ada’s memory was unusually acute. An exceptional little girl, driven by deep urges and insistent voices, her sensibility was easily worked upon. Brimful of life, spirit and animation, Ada was a most happy and cheerful child, with a disposition to enjoyment, quick to learn, and when rebuked, she bounced right back like a rubber ball. With a strong moral conscience and a well-developed sense of what was right and wrong, Ada could not rest at night without examining her conscience. She had a most unusual upbringing, tutored by the brightest minds. Ada developed a profound aptitude “for mental puzzles, mathematical conundrums and scientific discovery, that kept pace with the breathtaking advances of the industrial and social revolutions in Europe.” Ada gradually came into her own in thought and feeling, arguing very sensibly that virtue should be its own reward.

Aged seventeen, Ada met a kindred spirit in the mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage. Their mutual collaborations produced concepts and ideas presaging computer programming by nearly two hundred years. Ada’s boundless energy and amazing boldness inspired Charles Babbage to develop his “Analytical Engine,” an early mechanical computer. Ada explained the invention to a world that was not ready to imagine computers processing information by themselves. Ada and Babbage realized that their innovative work would only be appreciated by future generations. Ada was born well in advance of her times. Passionately interested in mathematics and scientific inventions, Ada Byron Lovelace is now recognized as a pioneer prophet of the Information Age. The author paints a fascinating, tragic and triumphant portrait of Ada’s singular intellect and insatiable drive for knowledge, as she cleverly maneuvered through the social norms of her life and times.

“Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer” is attractively illustrated with portraits and drawings to make it appealing. Ada springs to life as the unusually unique person she really was. Brilliant, mercurial and ambitious, born in an era that considered women’s minds to be incapable of serious reflection, Ada had innumerable barriers to overcome and hurdles to cross. Fiercely independent, Ada possessed unique, singular qualities of genius that made her stand apart. Extremely perceptive and intuitive, Ada was a “discoverer of the hidden realities of nature, with immense reasoning faculties, driving her toward an uncharted destiny.”