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Code Name Verity
31/3/12 08:50(1) Women being smart and loyal and heroic and AWESOME.
(2) Women being best friends with each other.
(3) Books that are superbly well written, intricately plotted, meticulously researched, with fantastic voices, and some parts that are very funny in the midst of terribly stuff happening, and some parts that are terribly harrowing and emotionally raw.
CODE NAME VERITY by Elizabeth Wein is precisely at the intersection of that Venn Diagram.
Queenie is Scottish and from a rich family, and having gone to school in Switzerland and being fluent in French and German she has the necessary connections to start working in intelligence. Maddie's grandparents immigrated from Russia, and her family owns a motorbike shop, which has given her the chance to learn how to take apart and rebuild an engine -- and a chance accident years before the war gives her the chance to learn to be a pilot, which is how she ends up ferrying planes from one place to another under cover of night for the RAF. When they meet, they develop a friendship that is tender and beautifully drawn.
And then, something happens to the pilot who was supposed to fly Queenie to France, and it's Maddie who ends up taking over. But the plane gets shot at and becomes unlandable. Queenie parachutes out, but -- she looks the wrong way when crossing the street ant the Nazis detain her as a spy. After being tortured, she agrees to give her captors information (and though there's nothing too graphic about the depiction of this, you can't help but sympathize with the decision.) What she writes is the life of her friend, Maddie, up to the point where the plane goes down.
That is about as much as I can say without spoiling the plot, which has a few remarkable revelations towards the end.
There are so few books like this, in the way the friendship between the two girls is so vital to the book. It's truly a love story, though a platonic one, and one of the most beautiful I've read recently. They never fall in love with the same boy and get jealous of each other, which if you read YA books is about the only thing that can happen to girls who are friends. They just care deeply for each other and they make a fantastic team.
The other piece of this is -- one of the reasons I don't often read things set in WWII, or the American Revolutionary War, is that so often they make an appeal to a kind of patriotism I just can't believe in, an assumption that the US is the Best Freeest Country God Ever Put On The Earth. Code Name Verity has courage and heroism in spades but it never feels like it's justified in terms of airy idealism. Queenie is good at being a spy and she likes it; Maddie is good at flying a plane and she loves it; and this puts them into some terribly dangerous places and watches how they react. That's all. It made me feel -- which I have never felt before -- "Yeah, if I was in that situation, I can see how I could end up fighting in a war."
I don't know that I will sign up for Yuletide this year just to ask for Code Name Verity fic, but I sure hope that someone does!
(2) Women being best friends with each other.
(3) Books that are superbly well written, intricately plotted, meticulously researched, with fantastic voices, and some parts that are very funny in the midst of terribly stuff happening, and some parts that are terribly harrowing and emotionally raw.
CODE NAME VERITY by Elizabeth Wein is precisely at the intersection of that Venn Diagram.
Queenie is Scottish and from a rich family, and having gone to school in Switzerland and being fluent in French and German she has the necessary connections to start working in intelligence. Maddie's grandparents immigrated from Russia, and her family owns a motorbike shop, which has given her the chance to learn how to take apart and rebuild an engine -- and a chance accident years before the war gives her the chance to learn to be a pilot, which is how she ends up ferrying planes from one place to another under cover of night for the RAF. When they meet, they develop a friendship that is tender and beautifully drawn.
And then, something happens to the pilot who was supposed to fly Queenie to France, and it's Maddie who ends up taking over. But the plane gets shot at and becomes unlandable. Queenie parachutes out, but -- she looks the wrong way when crossing the street ant the Nazis detain her as a spy. After being tortured, she agrees to give her captors information (and though there's nothing too graphic about the depiction of this, you can't help but sympathize with the decision.) What she writes is the life of her friend, Maddie, up to the point where the plane goes down.
That is about as much as I can say without spoiling the plot, which has a few remarkable revelations towards the end.
There are so few books like this, in the way the friendship between the two girls is so vital to the book. It's truly a love story, though a platonic one, and one of the most beautiful I've read recently. They never fall in love with the same boy and get jealous of each other, which if you read YA books is about the only thing that can happen to girls who are friends. They just care deeply for each other and they make a fantastic team.
The other piece of this is -- one of the reasons I don't often read things set in WWII, or the American Revolutionary War, is that so often they make an appeal to a kind of patriotism I just can't believe in, an assumption that the US is the Best Freeest Country God Ever Put On The Earth. Code Name Verity has courage and heroism in spades but it never feels like it's justified in terms of airy idealism. Queenie is good at being a spy and she likes it; Maddie is good at flying a plane and she loves it; and this puts them into some terribly dangerous places and watches how they react. That's all. It made me feel -- which I have never felt before -- "Yeah, if I was in that situation, I can see how I could end up fighting in a war."
I don't know that I will sign up for Yuletide this year just to ask for Code Name Verity fic, but I sure hope that someone does!
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