Code Name Verity

There are some books that you like. There are books that you love. There are books that, sometimes, on the rare occasion, you cry over.

And then--once in five blue moons--there's the books that gut you so hard that you can't cry, that you sit facing the wall, rendered completely speechless. The characters still gouge deep in you, and you. Simply. Can't.

This is a WWII book and it isn't. It's a war book and it isn't. It, however, is 100% a friendship story.

Here's a book called Code Name Verity.

Here's the jacket cover summary of the book:

"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"

There is a girl. A Scottish spy named Verity, who escaped the night the plane her friend was flying crashed into France. She is caught by the Gestapo. Given a choice: confess everything about the British War Effort, and be given time to write the confession, or be tortured.

She confesses--with the story of how she ended up in the wreckage, the story of Verity and her best friend, the pilot of that plane--Maddie Brodatt.

And what a confession it is. But she's tortured anyway.

What caught me was how beautifully the novel was constructed. The author could have made it dark, depressing, terrifying. She could have emphasized torture and Nazism. And she didn't. Her German interrogators spared her no mercy, but they were far from inhuman, almost comparable to the characters from The Book Thief. But while it spared the reader details, it also managed not to mitigate the darkness of the book. And I have no idea how she did that.

It was also funny. Of course, I'd get asked, "It's a WWII book where a girl gets tortured--how is it funny?" But the main character is Scottish and foul-mouthed, and her Hitler jokes, wrangled into her confession, are simply fabulous. Bonus--I understood every German sentence in that book.

In the end, it wasn't just a WWII story--it was a story of friendship, of a painstakingly-crafted confessions with devastating endings.