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Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Genre: Historical
Release Date: February 6, 2012
Publisher: Egmont Publishing
Source: Bought
Add it: Goodreads
Rating:

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.

“It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.”

Code Name Verity is a story about many things – WWII, the role of women during wartime, courage in the face of adversity but above all, it is a story about friendship. And it is utterly, completely, wholly heartbreaking.

The relationship between Julia and Maddie is the central focus of this novel and it gives context and purpose to the story our protagonist is telling. These two amazing, brilliant characters and the love they have for each other is profoundly sad (seriously, you will cry an ocean and then want to drown yourself in it) but also a testament to the bonds of friendship and love. I don’t even know how to articulate how perfectly written this entire novel is, especially when it comes to Julia and Maggie – one is an upper-class Lady with an actual title in front of her name; she went abroad to an exclusive boarding school and she lives in a castle. Another is a working-class girl living in a small cottage. Even the way the speak, one with slang with upper to middle-class students and the other with a definitive working-class accent (I think this is arguably more obvious to an English reader, though).  It is one of the ironies of wartime that these two girls meet and develop a bond that stands strong despite everything that happens to both of them. Their relationship can be interpreted as either platonic or romantic, it doesn’t really matter because the story can be read either way (although lbr, they’re ‘friends’ in the way Dean and Castiel are ‘friends’). Continue reading →