"Code Name Verity" by Elizabeth Wein (L1)

I'm in Love

Code Name Verity

By Elizabeth Wein



# Pgs: 368

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Overview:

Oct. 11th, 1943-A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.

When "Verity" is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn't stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she's living a spy's worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.

As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage, failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy?

A Michael L. Printz Award Honor book that was called "a fiendishly-plotted mind game of a novel" in The New York Times, Code Name Verity is a visceral read of danger, resolve, and survival that shows just how far true friends will go to save each other.

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Review:

I have no idea how Elizabeth Wein did it.

I am hooked.

By part two of this book I was ready to start singing it's praises. I don't know how to possibly serenade it with my love. It captured me, it captivated me, it took a couple of chapters to get in to, but this is the book. It is the one. I'm telling you that I am in love.

Code Name Verity made me laugh and very nearly cry at parts. For nearly the entirety of part two, I bawled my eyes out... The characters had so much, well, character and bravery that despite their own misgivings about themselves we've come to find, as the reader, how strong they really are. You have to remember that this is a historical fiction, the setting of which takes place during WWII. Though it stays away from the horrors of the Holocaust, the book gives our attention to a different point of view; that of a pilot and a spy. Code Name Verity gives me the mind to think about just how far I am, as a person, willing to go for someone else. It reminds me how devestated I am to see a loved one go through any kind of suffering, let alone the kind of suffering that "Verity" and Maddie go through together.

This book is remarkably well researched, filled with little in-facto's about the war, about the popculture of that time, and written literature I honestly had no idea existed. It's intriguing to want to learn through a book such as this without actually meaning to. When you fall in love with a character, when you see start to see things through their point of view, when you start to think through their minds... It's really quite difficult to put a book such as this down. Nearly impossible.

Through this I'm given an insight to the espionage and brutality that came with such a war as WWII. It was absolutely riveting. This is the kind of book that I have to return to the library so that I can buy my own copy. I'll want to read it again. In fact, I already do.

This story is beautiful. I'm kind of hoping they don't make a movie out of this, put to the words the visual aspect and drama that can be read here if one would just open their eyes. Then again, I'm kind of hoping they do. We did grow up in a visual culture, after all.

How can I stop telling you how much I loved this story? What can I say to convince you that this is a book that needs to be read?

Code Name Verity was written with a mind blowing sense of complexity. Little things that normally one would never notice seemed to overall tie the book together. The growing sense of desperation between two suffering best friends... With no idea what to do... One captured by the enemy and made to reveal everything... The other... Dead?

It's definitely a tear-jerker, especially since all isn't what it seems to be. My heart goes out to the main characters for the majority of the book, more so once I figured it out.

But you'll have to read all about that to find out how and why. And I would highly recommend that you do. I'm really hoping they don't make a movie out of this, because I know that then they (whoever they are) would butcher it. There would be no justice done to this wonderfully woven tale that Elizabeth Wein created. This book is outside the boundaries of the rating system. I cannot within my good conscience put a number to a book such as this.

But if I had to it would be ten. You know, out of five. The best book I've read since the book thief, three years ago. This is a book I cannot forget.

Now that I'm done being overly dramatic...

You should still read it.

Ok. That's it. Now I'm done. :)