Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Hyperion Press
Publishing year: 2012
Rating: 4/5

Synopsis: 
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 took me a while to get used to the voice of this book. For one it's in first person, which I am slowly becoming used to but its an uphill battle. For another it didn't have a good start.


First sentence: "I am a coward."
Okay that's not too bad. It does generate curiosity, which is always good but the next ten pages or so are dull. Secondly, I just found it very hard to like the narrator, at first anyway.

Thanks to some pretty awesome reviews I stuck through the boring bits and got to the more interesting ones that other reviews promised. Now I can say without a doubt I love this book. It's not an all time favorite of mine but neither is it a castaway.
As far as WWII novels go, I prefer Soldier X. It's a little less detailed, and oddly enough I like that. Still it was nice to learn so much about planes. It was hard at first but after two hundred pages I could say I had learned a little something.

What really pulled me in was the characterization and relationships between the characters. It was written to come off as sincere and genuine. It succeeded. There was no insta-love or fake friendships.  The ending was heartbreaking because I felt that I truly knew Julie and Maddie as people. It was so realistic, this story could have been based on a true story.

When all was said and done and I closed this book, one quote remains in my head. 

"Fly the plane, Maddie."