Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Book Synopsis:

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 and failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy?

My Review:

4.5/5 stars. This book was amazing! But its biggest problem was its length and pacing. The beginning, especially, was very slow and felt pretty disconnected. It took longer than I would have liked for things to start being revealed. But once it did start coming together, it was so good. It kept me hooked. There were so many plot twists and new revelations.

I wasn't hooked from the start. In fact, I was actually kind of bored at the beginning. It was mostly a series of unrelated anecdotes about Maddie and other random war details. I had no idea what the main plot was going to be. Because I knew from reviews, though, that this would be a very twisty book, I tried to make predictions already—most of which were wrong. But since I didn't know the main plot until it started to be revealed, it was harder to make predictions.

I loved Verity's narrative voice. She was detailed and descriptive without being dry, emotional without being melodramatic, and had her own sort of dark humor. Despite everything she was going through, she still kept fighting, and that came through in her narration.

Around halfway through the book, I really started to get invested. Things were starting to make more sense, but there was also still a lot being dragged out. My thought process was basically, "I'm too invested to stop, but I wish they would just get to it already."

The last third, however, was when everything came together and there were lots of big reveals. I can't say much without giving major spoilers, but there were many times I was saying "ohh" or gasping.

Another aspect I loved was the deep friendship between the narrator and Maddie. You could see how much they loved each other. That made certain events that happened later all the more devastating.

In general, this was an engaging story with twists and turns that would have benefitted from being a lot shorter. If the author had cut out a lot of the stories at the beginning and not taken quite as long to get to the reveals, it would have been five stars. There's such a thing as a slow burn, but this was a VERY slow burn that it made it less enjoyable.

Content:

Language: God's name taken in vain, d*mn, b*stard, sh*t, h*ll, wh*re, *ss, f*cking

Sexual Content: Sexual assault, a mention of someone "fondling" a woman's breasts (non-consensually), men making a sexual joke about a woman, a man that is way too touchy and inappropriate with women, kisses that aren't described

Violence/Gore: Torture, blood, starvation, a plane crash, bruises, wounds, injuries, execution, people getting shot at, someone trying to poison another person/make them drink acid, burns, dead bodies, chloroform

Drugs/Alcohol: Characters smoke cigarettes, soldiers take a stimulant drug, characters drink alcohol