Tuesday 29 July 2014

Code Name Verity 2

I ended up staying up late to finish it last night. Thoroughly enjoyed! My feeling about what Verity was doing was mostly accurate, but I didn't at all expect the denouement.

It's books like this that make me annoyed when people criticise Young Adult fiction, or say people shouldn't read it. It's a good book! Accessible to teenagers, but not infantilised or preachy or overly romanticised. Why shouldn't adults read that sort of book?

Monday 28 July 2014

Code Name Verity

I assume everyone had an English teacher who tried to get them to engage with a book by reading a page and then making you guess what was going to happen next?

I've found myself doing that quite a lot with Code Name Verity. I've been reading it for a Goodreads book club, and finding it engrossing, but I keep thinking it is going to go a bit Sarah Waters. Of course, as it is a young adult novel, the chances of it involving explicit lesbian sex are fairly remote.  The Scheherazade aspect, of a young woman spinning a story to save her life - or at least postpone her death - is well done.

I won't say how I think it'll be resolved, but my guess is that the name, Verity, is quite important.

ETA I just got up to a bit where Queenie gets called Scheherazade, so apparently that was a deliberate motif, not just my interpretation.