Tolog Review: Code Name Verity

Code Name Verity
by Elizabeth Wein
reviewed by Sophie Johnson

Imagine being stuck in a cell, tortured, or starved after being captured in enemy land. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein tells the story of two young women, Maddie and Queenie, and their incredibly strong friendship. The genre of this book is historical fiction, which is when some characters are fictional but it is in certain time or place in history. This story is set during World War II and with the powerful German Nazi party. The setting is in the mid 1930s to the early 40s. 

The book starts with the story of Maddie, a young girl in England, who rides a big motorcycle. She has always been interested in mechanics and transportation which leads her to becoming a very good pilot. Queenie is a British secret agent who gets caught in France and is taken captive in an old hotel that the Gestapos uses to hold their prisoners of war. She is tortured and forced into writing down confessions about everything she knows as a secret agent. In the hotel she is constantly watched by Engel a lady who watches over her and makes sure she keeps writing day after day. The man in charge is called SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden. He gives Queenie two weeks to write down everything she knows and if he does not get what he wants he will kill her in two weeks. What she writes down is the story of her how she became best friends with Maddie and all the information that comes with it. 

In the first couple pages the narrator is reciting her own account of the story but then it changes to talking about this girl called Maddie. This is because Queenie is writing about her and Maddie’s story so she writes in the third person for herself which was confusing at first. Also in the first half of the book Queenie is narrating and in the second half Maddie is narrating. Queenie says at the beginning on the book “And I’m going to give you everything you ask, everything I can remember. Absolutely Every Last Detail” (Wein 3) right before she begins her first confession. Doing this Wein makes the story even more powerful and personal because the knowledge given of both sides of the main characters. Wein uses the motif of Peter Pan which gives more visuals and description to her readers. When Maddie arrives at Queenie’s family’s house Maddie describes how she got to their house as “Second to the right, and then straight on till morning” (Wein 124). He also matches the characters in both stories “Von Linden resembles Captain Hook in that he is rather upright story of gentleman spite of his being a brute,” (Wein 5). Wein adds a lot of creativity to the book and also provides familiarity to the reader with a well known story that they can relate to.