Really cute! Zoey’s been homeschooled her entire life and the only thing helping her cope with the new start is her blunt coding program.

I loved the artwork. The story played with cliches and subverted them the slightest bit though the ending felt abrupt.

3.5
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Twelve-year-old Zoey has been home-schooled her entire life but now that her parents are starting their own business, she's being sent to middle school after the school year has already started. She's not too nervous though because she's an expert coder who built her own "cool code" app that analyzes every scenario and lets her know how to act so that she will appear effortlessly cool. Except she soon finds that being cool is harder than it looks, and her app might need some adjustments ...

This was a fun book that is mostly realistic but has the app's mascot (a unicorn) jump out and act a little more anthropomorphized than it should. The emotions are big, with a fun illustration style that really puts a lot of emphasis on the eyes for this. It goes through a lot of common middle school tropes, particularly finding and maintaining friendships, plus questions of identity and the pull-and-tug of boundaries with parents. I could definitely see this appealing to fans of the Making Friends graphic novel series, which has a similar quirky style to it. ( )

This was a really fun and interesting graphic novel. Zoe has been homeschooled her entire life and is now going to school for the very first time in the middle of a semester during middle school. Zoe‘s parents are coders, and she learned from them. She developed her own app, called the cool code to help her in every day life to be a better person than she already is. But her original app is not as good or work as well as it should. When Zoe joins the coding club, the entire club, take it up as a project to make it better and make Zoe one of the cool kids. Zoe by complete mistake makes her own friends and learns that being cool isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be if you have to be someone besides yourself. This book was a lot of fun and had a great message and made coding more cool then kids might think of it otherwise. Overall, I could see this book staying on the shelves for years to come. ( )