Audiobook Awesomeness: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

I am working on a few things right now. I had to finish The Selection quicker than anticipated and therefore I am still working the Memoirs of Lady Trent. I did finish this amazing audiobook just a few days ago and I wanted to write about it right away because, peeps, it is amazeballs!

Plot summary via GoodReads. 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.

This story begins with a young lady whose code name is Verity. She has been captured in Nazi-occupied France in 1943 and this is her confession to the SS Gestapo. Halfway through the story our narrators switch from Verity’s confession to her best friend Maddie who tries to rescue her from the German compound.

It is during Maddie’s story that we learn more about Verity and that she is not a reliable narrator to us, the audience. I didn’t even think about it until now that we were looking at her confession that her German captors would be reading so of course she left stuff out.

I am absolutely in love with this story!  I was hooked the entire time. I do not always enjoy historical fiction, but this was so beautifully written that even I liked it and learned something from it. As much as history is involved in the story, it is really a story about two best friends.  Their relationship makes us all think about our best friends and how we would do anything for them even if we don’t see them all the time.

The story was of course amazing, but the audiobook was beyond the best I have ever heard. The narrators felt extremely real and even left me in tears at one point (which I can’t reveal as it is a spoiler).

Not only is this book great for reluctant readers, but any high school World History teacher or literature teacher should consider this as a supplement to any lessons on World War II. The descriptions of British Air Force procedures and technology at the time extended this book to not just entertainment, but educational as well.

Again, a great example of how audiobooks can help reluctant readers become expert readers.