REVIEW: Code Name Verity

Wein, E.  (2012).  Code Name Verity.  New York:  Hyperion.

333 pages.


When it came to choosing to read Code Name Verity, descriptions of the story didn't really win me over.  I imagined the humorless drama, angst, and depictions of the horrors of war I usually associate with historical war fiction.  And I wasn't exactly feeling it.  But then there were sooooo many recommendations to read it, I sighed and climbed off my judgmental high chair to read it.

I'm glad I did.  Because within the first few pages, although some of horrors of war are certainly present, I found myself chuckling--actually chuckling--at some of the protagonists' narration.

What a wonderful surprise.


Appetizer:  Scottie has been captured by the Gestapo in France in 1943 two days after the Allied plane that carried her there crashed.  Unlike some of the other Allied prisoners being held with her, she takes the "easy route" and immediately reveals what few secrets she knows.  Ordered to write her confessions for the Gestapo, Scottie shares about her past leading up to the war and about Maddie; the friend she flew to France with and the girl who led her to this point.

Scottie's confessions reveal her tortures, fears, frustrations, as well as her passions and her intelligence as she awaits her fate.

I was rather surprised when Code Name Verity switched to explore another character's point of view about two-thirds of the way through the novel.  I have to admit, despite the dark realities Scottie faced, I would have happily faced them by continuing to read from her point of view.  I actually put the book down for several days, it took me by that much of surprise to have to read another character's story. (although, this change in point of view proves essential to reveal Scottie's true nature as well as the strength of her friendship with Maddie.)

Another difficulty I had was the way that the topic suddenly switched or the way Verity would be recording about her past then suddenly switch to insult her captors.  It could be a little off-putting, especially for struggling readers.

Despite these issues (which may solely be mine), I hope history teachers will consider assigning Code Name Verity in their classes; either as a whole class read or as an optional read.  It does a wonderful job of revealing women's roles in World War II as well as showing the terrible conditions and tortures that spies and prisoners of war faced.  It would also make a great recommendation for students passionate about airplanes or flying.

Assign it, teachers!  Assign it!

Read it, young adults!  Read it!


Dinner Conversation:

"I am a coward.
I wanted to be heroic and I pretended I was.  I have always been good at pretending.  I spent the first twelve years of my life playing at the Battle of Stirling Bridge with my five big brothers--and even though I am a girl they let me be William Wallace, who is supposed to be one of our ancestors, because I did the rousing battle speeches." (p. 3)

"I'm just damned.  I am utterly and completely damned.  You'll shoot me at the end no matter what I do, because that's what you do to enemy agents.  It's what we do to enemy agents.  After I write this confession, if you don't shoot me and I ever make it home, I'll be tried and shot as a collaborator anyway.  But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and this is the easy one, the obvious one.  What's in my future--a tin of kerosene poured down my throat and a match held to my lips?  Scalpel and acid, like the Resistance boy who won't talk?  My living skeleton packed up in a cattle wagon with two hundred desperate others, carted off God knows where to die of thirst before we get there?  No.  I'm not traveling those roads.  This is the easiest.  The others are too frightening even to look down." (p. 5)

"You really think I know a damned thing about where the Allies are planning to launch their invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe?  I am a Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever.  Bearing in mind that the people who trained me encouraged my blissful ignorance of airfields just so I couldn't tell you such a thing if you did catch me, and not forgetting that I wasn't even told the name of the airfield we took off from when I came here:  let me remind you that I had been in France less than 48 hours before that obliging agent of yours had to stop me being run over by a French van  full of French chickens because I'd looked the wrong way before crossing the street.  Which shows how cunning the Gestapo are.  'This person I've pulled from beneath the wheels of certain death was expecting traffic to travel on the left side of the road.  Therefore she must be British, and is likely to have parachuted into Nazi-occupied France out of an Allied plane.  I shall now arrest her as a spy.'" (p. 6)

"And the story of how I came to be here starts with Maddie.  I don't think I'll ever know how I ended up carrying her National Registration card and pilot's license instead of my own ID when you picked me up, but if I tell you about Maddie you'll understand why we flew here together." (p. 7)

"There are a few more types of aircraft that I know, but what comes to mind is the Lysander.  That is the plane Maddie was flying when she dropped me here.  She was actually supposed to land the plane, not dump me out of it in the air.  We got fired at on the way in, and for a while the ail was in flames and she couldn't control it properly, and she made me bail out before she tried to land.  I didn't see her come down.  But you showed me the photos you took at the site, so I know she has crashed an airplane by now.  Still, you can hardly blame it on the pilot when her plane gets hit by antiaircraft fire." (p. 14)


Tasty Rating:  !!!!

The 2011 Cybils Awards: My perspective on the nominee Everybody Sees the Ants

Appetizer:  As a freshman, Lucky Linderman took a vow to stop smiling.  Since the age of seven, he has been bullied.  His tormentor, a boy named Nader, has always gotten away with his pranks, bullying and threats.

The one person who seems to help Lucky is his grandfather.  A prisoner of war in Vietnam who visits with Lucky in his dreams.

When Nader's bullying grows worse, Lucky's mom uproots them both for a vacation and Lucky finds himself guided by his uncle and maybe even facing a romance.


Opening Quotation:

"All I did was ask a stupid question.
Six months ago I was assigned the standard second-semester freshman social studies project at Freddy High:  Create a survey, evaluate data, graph data, express conclusion in a two-hundred-word paper.  This was an easy A.  I thought up my question and printed out 120 copies.
The question was:  If you were going to commit suicide, what method would you choose? (p. 3)


My Thoughts:  I really liked that Everybody Sees the Ants took on the issue of bullying.  I also liked that it would lend itself to discussing the Vietnam War.

A.S. King's writing was clear.  She created a great voice for Lucky.

However, the magical realism of Lucky's conversations with his grandfather did not work for me at all.

Nonetheless, check this one out!  I was glad the Cybils Award gave me an excuse to pick it up.

Banned Book Week REVIEW: Fallen Angels

Meyers, Walter Dean. (1988). Fallen Angels.
309 pages -- 0-590-40943-3

Thirty Second Summary: Richie Perry’s a seventeen-year-old basketball player from Harlem. He tries to be a good role model for his brother Kenny. He’s got a knee injury that should have kept him out of the war, but due to a mix-up, his medical files have gone missing and he’s shipped overseas to Vietnam. His only goal now is getting out alive.

Fallen Angels is one of my failsafe book recommendations for my male friends who “can’t find anything to read.” (This isn't to say girls won't enjoy it -- I certainly did, at age fifteen -- but guys are more drawn to the cover, I think.) It’s exciting, it’s tense, it’s occasionally funny, and at times downright terrifying. It’s a war story, but also a political statement… with some regular old teenage drama thrown in for good measure. If you’re uncomfortable with introspective moments, though, this may not be the novel for you. Fallen Angels will make you ask yourself what you would do, and how you would change, in the situation in which Perry finds himself.

Reasons Censored:

Banned because of vulgar language, sexual explicitness, and graphic violence. Oh, and drug abuse, and torture. And slang terms for homosexuals, and racial epithets.

Potential Counter-Arguments:

I’m sorry. Are we not talking about the Vietnam War? I don’t recall that was a time filled with polite discourse and hugs and puppies. Vietnam, as one of the characters puts it, is “like a trip to friggin’ hell.” So yes. There is killing. There is a lot of killing, and all of it is senseless. Soldiers die, civilians die, babies die, and Perry finds it every bit as confusing and disgusting and terrifying as the reader does. There is also vulgar language, and torture, and sexual explicitness, all of which is representative of the situations the soldiers found themselves in.

I’m not saying that you should give this book to a seven-year-old, any more than I’d suggest handing them a copy of The Things They Carried, or letting them watch the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I do, however, find it slightly ironic that high school students as young as those who fought in the war are now being banned from reading about that time period.

This is an incredibly powerful novel, and an incredibly powerful anti-war statement. There is none of the great, sweeping war-story romance one would expect in a book aimed at teenage boys, but neither does it come off as preachy. If we lose the reality of war, and only hold on to the Guns and Glory aspect of the thing, we’re setting ourselves up for further senseless conflict – young adults, who are capable of enlisting in the military, should certainly understand every aspect and implication of their decisions.

Quotes of Note:

We were supposed to smile a lot and treat the people with dignity. They were supposed to think we were the good guys. That bothered me a little. I didn’t like having to convince anybody that I was the good guy. That was where we were supposed to start from. We, the Americans, were the good guys. Otherwise it didn’t make the kind of sense I wanted it to make. (p. 112)

“Vietnam don’t mean nothing, man,” Johnson said. “We could do the same thing someplace else. We just over here killing people to let everybody know we gonna do it if it got to be done.” (p. 149)

I stopped for a moment to look at the bodies of two old men, their arms around each other in death. I saw them even after I turned away. (p. 178)

I went to the john and puked my guts out. I was scared…. I couldn’t breathe, my hands were sweating. What would I do? I had heard of guys running away to Sweden. How the hell did you get to Sweden from Nam? Was there still a Sweden to run to? (p. 217)

Tasty Rating: !!!!!