Review: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Summary

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.

My thoughts

 I feel kind of bad for writing a negative review about this book. It’s such a unique story about a wonderful friendship and with a interesting setting . Before I started reading this I expected it to blow my mind and break my heart. I thought this was going to be one of those books that make me cry and I would love it for doing that. But it wasn’t. Instead I was bored and even the most shocking and heartbreaking scene didn’t make me feel anything. It just couldn’t make the slightest impact. 

Things that bothered me about this story:

A lot of rather boring plotlines

When you tell a story about friendship of course you would tell how the characters met and how they got to be friends. In this case this was pretty boring in my opinion. All these information about the girls’ jobs and about airplanes and flying might make for an interesting setting but I wasn’t interested in them at all.

The way this story is told

This is an idea that in itself can be pretty good but in this case I didn’t like it. Writing down a story in a story always feels kind of artificial. It’s just the character saying that he/she is now writing something down and then it feels like you just continue reading the story. In this case this was even worse. One character writes down the story of another in such vivid details and that in the situation she is in that I thought it really unrealistic.

Sometimes really predictable

This is something I usually don’t care about. But when it feels like the author wanted to keep this secret hidden to later reveal it in a surprising way so that the reader is left shocked, then already knowing way earlier gives the impression that some characters are rather stupid to not notice it themselves earlier.
There was one point where I actually was surprised and that was then the point where I finally started to like the book but sadly that happened near the end of the story.

I couldn’t relate to the characters

This is probably the major point that kept me from liking this book. When I’m not interested in what happens to the characters the story can be the best there is, I would not like it anyway.
I can’t really tell why this is. It might be because we mostly get to know them through their writing and I didn’t like that.

Overall

I really wanted to like this book. I was short of giving up on it so many times but always kept going because I wouldn’t give up hope that I would still fall for it. I only liked the last 150 pages and as interesting as this setting was, overall it felt like a huge disappointment to me.