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?
Tuesday, 29 July 2014
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.
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.
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