2.18.2017

Book Review: Code Name Verity


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.


Rating: ★★★.5

Code Name Verity was a very interesting read. This was the book that my book club chose for this month, and I was very excited because I had heard good things about it. The story is about an Allied spy captured by the Nazis during World War II, who is being tortured into writing a confession detailing the British war effort. The woman decides to tell such information through the story of her best friend Maddie, the English pilot who brought her to France.

There are a lot of things that make this novel great, but there are also things that I didn’t like about it. And that’s why my rating is 3.5 out of 5. The author must have had to do so much research to write this story! It’s amazing the amount of detail, and most of it are things that we don’t usually hear in History class. I love that the two main characters are women. I never knew to what extent they were able to help with the war effort, and it was really cool to see that, although most were put in inferior positions than men who sometimes had less knowledge/experience than them, many women held very important roles. I really enjoyed learning more about this side of the war, about the Allied forces, since most of the WWII related books I’ve read are more focused on Germany and the Jews.

However, to be honest, for more than half of the book I was kinda bored. I didn’t really care that much about Maddie’s story, and not a lot of action was happening. If you’ve read the book, you know that things change at a bit after the middle of the novel, and you begin to find out plot twists that you didn’t even know where happening. Although that made the book ten times better for me, it was a bit too late for it to be completely redeemed in my eyes. It was like the second part was saying “hey, here is why the first part wasn’t so boring after all!” But you can’t erase the fact that it was boring while I was reading it. 

My favourite part about the book, besides the historical things I learned while reading it, was the characters. They were so great, especially the two main ones, and so easy to relate to! Two strong female protagonists aren’t so easy to find, so it was nice to see them being so badass in a time where gender equality was less common it is today. 

        I recommend this book if you're looking for a historical fiction that shows a different side of the war, and that has two great female protagonists! 

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