#spy book
I just love the idea of people finding out about all the crazy stuff Alex Rider has done.
Shot the priminister? Obviously
Been in a shoot out on Air Force one? Average Monday
Star Rating: ***** (5 Stars)
Code Name Verity just blew me away.
On the surface, this book appears to be the story of an unnamed English SCOTTISH female spy who has been captured by the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France. The bribe of a few basic amenities such as her clothes and a blanket prompts her to make a deal with her interrogators - she’ll give them wireless code and a full, written “confession” if they stop torturing her to the point of insanity.
The first interesting twist comes in the narrative style, when the prisoner decides to tell the story from her best friend Maddie’s point of view. The intimacy of this choice sets the tone for the rest of the book. Our narrator, who identifies herself by the nickname Queenie for most of her confession, tells the story of how she and Maddie became best friends with a casual knowledge of Maddie’s mind and feelings that says more than the actual stories. It becomes clear almost immediately that though Queenie is the narrator, her entire motivation for staying alive is to keep Maddie safe.
Maddie is a pilot. This book is historical fiction, and one of the reasons I loved it so much was the description of wartime occupations for women in England. Maddie is a mechanic, an engineer, a wireless operator, and one of the best civilian pilots the Auxiliary Transport Authority has. She flies broken and damaged planes all across England every day until she gets scouted to start ferrying unidentified spies to and from secret air bases. Maddie’s love of being in the air is beautiful to read, and her devotion to Queenie is how I feel about my own two best friends.
Queenie’s account of her history as a spy, her friendship with Maddie, and her incarceration in France has a few bits that jumped out to me immediately as incongruous. On the surface it appears that Queenie is thoroughly cowed by her torturers. She is disgusted by her own cowardice, by her willingness to spill important secrets at the mention of kerosene, and by her own memory for being good enough that she has many secrets to spill. Don’t get too complacent though, all is not as it appears! Queenie is, after all, a skilled spy.
Code Name Verity is simultaneously an action-packed adventure and a hauntingly sweet story about friendship. I’m still not over it, and I read it a week ago. By then end I was in tears (be warned, this is not a happy book) and I had to immediately give it to my Dad so that someone else would know my pain. Read it with compassion and a devious mind.
