Reviews

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

misterintensity's review

1.0

Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, looks back on her life especially her relationship with her mother and her love of mathematics. The prologue is a long recounting of the tumultuous courtship and brief marriage of Lord Byron and Anne Milbanke including Ada's. After that overlong prologue Chiaverini has her narrator Ada recount her childhood from the moment her mother left Lord Byron when she was seven weeks old. Ada recounting events she couldn't possibly remember and probably wouldn't be told about in detail considering how much strain there was with her relationship with her mother was jarring. At points she goes into detail about everything that went on around her and how knowledgeable about various academic subjects ,which provides the reader some insight until you look at the date stamp at the beginning of each chapter and realize that she could not be more than two years old when these events occurred. Ada's unbelievable precociousness makes the first quarter of the book hard to get through. It doesn't get much easier to read as Ada gets older because every sentence is infused with how unfair her mother treats her and how she holds her back. This book covers almost all of Ada's life, yet it does not seem like she really grows much as a character as she gets older. The same could be said about her mother who comes across horribly, although Ada does not come out much better. Chiaverini's specialty is historical fiction which fleshes out the known facts of real people but they turn out to be more caricatures than real people. The book is at its strongest when Ada describes her mathematical and scientific passions, especially her work with Charles Babbage's Difference and Analytical Engines but that's something you could read about in Ada Lovelace's biographies and does not justify a fictional account of her life which really adds nothing but angst in her narrative. This book is mainly for those who like historical family melodramas, although outside of the prologue there really isn't much drama besides the tone of Ada's narration and that just make her an unlikable protagonist more than anything else. For those who want to learn more about Ada's place in computer science history you are better off sticking with the nonfiction works covering that very subject.

liliales's review against another edition

4.0

I guess I'd give it 3.5 stars. I enjoyed learning about Ada Lovelace and her background, and how certain aspects of her life might have formed her story, but I felt sad through it all, and then a bit of the epilogue sort of finished me off.

It all felt a bit empty, and I don't know if it's because it's hard to create warmth with the amount of information available, or if it was just that particular group of people, or the author's point of view of them. At the same time, I am highly recommending it for people who want to know more about life in the 1830s and 40s, and about the kind of people who lived at that time, and general details about Lovelace's interest in mathematics and Charles Babbage and his calculating machines.

amandatastic's review against another edition

3.0

This book was far too slowly paced. I almost gave up, but I finally finished. I think 100-200 pages could’ve been cut easily. I did learn some new things about Ada though.

alanna_h's review

inspiring relaxing medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Diverse cast of characters? No

5.0

theuntrainedlibrarian's review

adventurous emotional hopeful informative inspiring sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

little_miss_3657's review

informative lighthearted reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

traceyyoung's review

informative sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I wanted to like this book more due to Ada’s contribution to maths at a time when females were not expected to have a career. Ada and her mother are strong females and I admired this in them. My problem was there was so much detail which meant the story lost its flow in places. I do feel that I learnt about this period of history from the story though. 

shaniquekee's review

3.0

This was a beautifully written, highly detailed, fictionalized account of the life of Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, credited by many as the first to write a computer program. Kudos to the author on her detailed research into the life of Ada and the diligence with which she laid out Ada's life for us. However, the book got tedious at times, particularly in the early chapters which describe Ada's infancy and childhood at great length. I would have been totally fine if this book were a hundred pages shorter.

kgormley's review

3.0

This was a different book ... the life of Lady Augusta Aida Byron Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Throughout the entire book, she refers to ways her mother tried to keep her "bad Byron blood" from coming through. By the end I was feeling like any "bad blood" she had, may very well have come from her mother's side, not her father's. WRITE MORE

emmehuffman's review

4.0

The prologue was long and left me concerned that the book would drag on, but I was relieved that it didn't. I was frustrated by Ada's mother, but I know that I was supposed to be: she was frustrating and misguided. I was frustrated by the ending, which happens months before her death. Or, more accurately, it was not the ending itself that frustrated me, it was that the story ended before her death, but went into a lot of detail about events Ada was too young to remember or which happened before she was born.