Code Name Verity

Author: Elizabeth Wein

Year: 2012

Publisher: Hyperion New York

Pages: 332

Goodreads 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.

Every once in a while a book comes along that just flat out tells a beautiful, moving and mesmerizing story. That's what this was. I laughed and I cried and I cried while laughing. I felt Queenie's pain and fear as a POW. I felt both women's frustration in trying to survive in the male dominated war effort. It was so refreshing to read a book where there wasn't a romance involved. Instead it was just a great story about the friendship of two girls and their story. 

"It's a bit like being in love, finding your best friend."

The above is one of my favorite quotes from the book. I understand this line so much. Finding your best friend that's also a "bosom buddy" or "soul mate" is like falling in love. 

Wein does a magnificent job writing her characters. And it's not just the Maddie and Queenie that moved me and that I loved. I was intrigued by her German captors, their friends and the other prisoners. The people were flaws, but at the same time loving, and very, very human. She showed how people got caught up in a war and ended up on sides that some didn't really believe in. Wein had a way of telling a story but then at the end, I saw where I had  missed a number of clues all the way around as to things that were happening behind the scenes or from other points of views or right in front of me and I didn't see it. The story was a weaving of an intricate spider web. 

I highly recommend it.