Saturday, April 27, 2013

Code Name Verity


Code Name Verity
Elizabeth Wein

Code Name Verity

Genre: Young Adult Historical Fiction

Summary (from the publisher):  I have two weeks. You’ll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.

That’s what you do to enemy agents. It’s what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine — and I will do anything, anything, to avoid SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden interrogating me again.

He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I’m going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France — an Allied Invasion of Two.

We are a sensational team


Review:  It is going to be very hard to write a review of this book without giving anything away, so I will just say that I loved this book.

Well, okay, I'll say a little more.  If you read the back cover or the first page, you'll realize that the main character has been captured by the Nazis as a spy and is basically sentenced to death.  So there are some disturbing parts that talk about torture or concentration camps, but the main focus of the book is the beautiful friendship that develops between two ordinary British girls who get involved in the war effort in England in a way that is out of the ordinary for women.  I was intrigued by the details of life in Britain during the war and life in the French Resistance, but I was captivated by the bravery, cleverness and strength of the two friends. 

As I was reading, I had a few complaints about the narrative style - it's basically a journal where the writer refers to herself in the third person (which was hard to get used to) and is interrupted frequently by Nazis (which breaks up the story a little) but I ultimately decided that these only served to enhance the story.  I also found the frequent references to Peter Pan a little weird.

I think this could be a good book for a book club, if the members don't mind a few tears while they read.

Rating: 5 stars

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