Review: Code Name Verity

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Code Name Verity #1
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Released: May 7th, 2013

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.

Taken from Goodreads

Start: 4/16/2014 | End: 4/20/2014 | Pages: 339 | Rating: 4.5 Stars 

My Thoughts:

Oh how this book messed with me. I really don't know how I'm going to sleep tonight. Because this is how I feel now:

Code Name Verity is a phenomenal story woven together by the journal entries of a secret operatives agent caught by the Gestapo in France. Known as a number of names, "Verity" delivers what she calls her confession through writing, telling her captors the story of two women, Maddie and Queenie, that met only by chance, and yet became the best of friends.

As Verity sells her intricate story, she knows she's running out of time before the captain deems her useless, and sends her away to concentration camp, or Natzweiler-Struthof. Yet, she begs for as much paper and time she can get. And her story? Is she really revealing everything to the enemy? 

Well fellow bloggers, you will figure it out when you read this book!

Oh Queenie and Maddie! Elizabeth Wein has created truly wonderful characters. I really want to be friends with them. Queenie, the confident, smart, deceitful translator, full of wit and cunning. She has made my top ten bravest and most loved female characters. And Maddie reminds me of myself! So determined to fly over England, and later France, that she fights for a position on the Air Transport Auxiliary (taxi-ing refugees to and from Nazi Occupied France) even though she's a woman. These women are perfect.

Seriously, these two girls' journal entries are remarkable. They actually write what they think, and I love the personality that comes out from it. QUEENIE YOU ARE SO WITTY. I wish I could meet you in real life.

And the amount of detail put in this book is incredible. Which may be the pitfall and the great thing about this book (how is this possible?) Truth be told, I started out slow. The beginning dragged on a lot since there was A LOT of information about different types of planes, and the different airfields and bases, and a ton of WWII terminology. Another thing was that there was rarely any dialogue. Each page was packed with words from top to bottom. No wonder it took me more than 6 hours to read it (total, not in one sitting).

After a certain point, however, the story took off running. I read the entire last half of the book because I could not put it down. Since I became familiar with the setting and the terminology, it became easier to read.

The ending nearly destroyed me. I have not cried about a book in so long, not since reading The Book Thief and The Fault in Our Stars. This book is not predictable at all. I really was not expecting what was going to happen, and if I did, I would have not read it at all. Nope. I would've avoided it like the plague.  

So yes, this was a great read. I'm not sure what else I should say because I'm still shocked by the ending, except that I really liked Code Name Verity. The friendship between these two girls is really beautiful, and my review doesn't show it at all. So really, just read the book!

✰✰✰✰1/2